Isaac Newton, Gale E. Christianson

Isaac Newton

Gale E. Christianson

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

I S A A C N E W T O N

L I V E S A N D L E G A C I E S

Larzer Ziff

M A R K T W A I N

David S. Reynolds

W A L T W H I T M A N

Edwin S. Gaustad

R O G E R W I L L I A M S





2005

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further

Oxford University’s objective of excellence

in research, scholarship, and education.

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi

Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi

New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices in

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece

Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore

South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2005 by Gale E. Christianson

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York, 10016

www.oup.com

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Christianson, Gale E.

Isaac Newton / Gale E. Christianson.— 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-19-530070-3

ISBN-10: 0-19-530070-X

1. Newton, Isaac, Sir, 1642–1727.

2. Physicists—Great Britain—Biography.

I. Title.

QC16.N7C51 2005

530'.092—dc22

2005009600

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

www.oup.com

To Miss Rhonda

This page intentionally left blank

P R E F A C E x i

One“ T O P L A Y P H I L O S O P H I C A L L Y ” 1

Two“ M Y G R E A T E R F R I E N D ” 1 2

ThreeO F G E N I U S , F I R E , A N D P L A G U E 2 4

FourT H E R E V O L U T I O N A R Y P R O F E S S O R 3 4

Five“ K I N D L I N G C O A L ” 4 3

SixT H E A L C H E M I S T 5 3

C O N T E N T S

v i i

v i i i C O N T E N T S

Seven“ A B O O K N O B O D Y U N D E R S T A N D S ” 6 3

Eight“ Y O U R M O S T U N F O R T U N A T E

S E R V A N T ” 7 7

NineM A R K O F T H E L I O N 8 8

TenT H E R O Y A L S O C I E T Y 1 0 1

ElevenW A R 1 1 0

Twelve“ L I K E A B O Y O N T H E S E A S H O R E ” 1 2 2

N O T E S 1 2 9

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G 1 3 5

I N D E X 1 4 1

i xC H A P T E R T I T L E

Doing easily what others find difficult is talent;

doing what is impossible for talent is genius.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel


AT ONCE MORTAL AND IMMORTAL, ISAAC NEWTON WAS BOTH A

living, breathing man and a legend that forever changed the

world. Yet so reclusive was he at his most creative that his biogra-

phers have succeeded in viewing him only through a glass darkly.

During a rare moment of introspection, Newton once compared

himself to a boy playing on a seashore, casting about for a few

beautiful pebbles that he likened to his greatest discoveries. It is

worth noting, however, that even this simple metaphor is mislead-

ing. While Newton’s home was an island, he never set eyes on the

open sea beyond the fens until well after he had grown to man-

hood. Neither, so far as is known, did he seriously entertain the

idea of taking in the wonders of the Continent only a short sail

away, or of communing with Europe’s foremost scientific minds.

Newton was a loner pure and simple, secure in the knowledge

that he was without peers when it came to almost all matters

cerebral. The only person who knew him well was his enigmatic

chamber fellow John Wickins, who lived with him when he was

formulating the calculus, conducting his brilliantly counter-

intuitive prism experiments, and undergoing his earliest inti-

mations of gravity. When the two men finally parted company

after sharing the same lodgings at Cambridge University for some

twenty years, Wickins married and moved away to become a

x i

P R E F A C E

successful country parson, leaving behind neither letters nor mem-

oirs regarding his supremely gifted friend.

Perhaps Wickins’s silence was at least partly due to the fact

that he understood so little of what Newton was about, although

he often took the part of Newton’s copyist. This was no less true

of Humphrey Newton, a distant relative hired by Sir Isaac to stoke

the fires of his alchemical furnace during what Humphrey called

“spring & fall of the Leaf.” Humphrey described his employer as

a man possessed, one who slept next to the fire through the night

without bothering to remove so much as a single article of cloth-

ing. As for what Newton was searching for, Humphrey, like the

sorcerer’s apprentice, hadn’t a clue. “His Pains, his Diligence at

those set Times,” Humphrey wrote, “made me think he aimed at

something beyond the Reach of human Art & Industry.”

So it went for thirty years and more until Newton resigned his

professorship and set out for the greener pastures of London.

There he took charge of the royal mint, where he transformed the

coining of England’s silver and gold while vengefully running

counterfeiters to ground for a date with the hangman’s noose. And

it was in London, while Newton was presiding over the Royal

Society like some grand potentate, that he went to war against the

German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and England’s

astronomer royal, John Flamsteed.

While I can claim no personal knowledge of Newton, I have

spent much of the past twenty-five years reading, thinking, and

writing about him. This short biography is the partial distillate of

that intractable—indeed sometimes maddening—quest for under-

standing, and is aimed at the casual reader who wishes to know

something more of Newton beyond his “discovery” of universal

gravitation. Still, after all that time, I, too, see him through a glass

x i i P R E F A C E

darkly. As one Newton scholar remarked, “It would take another

Newton to understand Newton.” I am anything but that person,

yet neither were all the others who have accepted the challenge of

putting his remarkable life on paper. What sustained me was the

privilege of standing over Newton’s shoulder, a silent witness to

the creative process as it unfolded in all its majesty. Think of it: a

lone human being bent low over a desk, supplied with nothing

more than a quill pen, a pot of homemade ink, and countless

sheets of blank paper, calculating precisely how the cosmos goes.

When an awed French mathematician wrote to an English

friend and fellow member of the Royal Society, he wanted to know

if Sir Isaac Newton eats and drinks and sleeps like other men. Of

course, his friend replied, “He assumes nothing and puts himself

on a level with all mankind.” It was an opinion with which the

brilliant astronomer and comet seeker Edmond Halley profoundly

disagreed: “Nearer to the gods,” Halley declared, “no mortal may

approach,” lifting Newton to the stars.

x i i iP R E F A C E




1“ T O P L A Y P H I L O S O P H I C A L LY ”

One

“ T O P L A Y

P H I L O S O P H I C A L L Y ”

AT A LITTLE BEFORE TEN O’CLOCK THE DRUM ROLL BEGAN, FIRST

distant and then ever louder as the thousands gathering to see the

king die wound their way through London’s choked streets to the

palace of Whitehall. It was January 30, 1649. The weather was

exceedingly cold, the sky gray with scattered patches of sunshine,

the frost so sharp that great chunks of ice clogged the arches of

London Bridge spanning the river Thames.

The previous day fifty-nine judges had signed the death war-

rant of King Charles I, many of them badgered and bullied by the

rebel leader Oliver Cromwell, who was about to assume the title

of Lord Protector and rule as a king in everything but name. It

was Cromwell and his Roundheads, who cut their hair short in

defiance of the wigged nobility and practiced the Puritan religion,

who most wanted the king’s head. They had fought Charles and

his supporters, many of whom were sympathetic to the outlawed

Catholic religion, ever since 1642, when civil war erupted in the

2 I S A A C N E W T O N

north of England and spread across the land like a great plague.

Now the leader of the defeated forces had to pay.

Fearing that the cold would cause him to shiver and give his

enemies the false impression that he was afraid, Charles donned

two sets of underclothes before putting on his best suit. Flanked

by the Bishop of London and his personal attendant, Herbert,

the king stepped out of the palace of St. James and headed through

the surrounding park toward the scaffold at Whitehall Palace,

whose construction the night before had disturbed his sleep. He

walked so fast between the double line of soldiers guarding the

way that his escorts could barely keep pace. Once at Whitehall he

ate a little bread and drank some wine.

At two o’clock there was a break in the clouds. The crowd, kept

at a distance by several rows of soldiers, could just make out figures

passing rapidly behind the windows of the banquet hall. Suddenly

the king emerged by stepping through a long window and onto the

scaffold. He knelt down and laid his head upon the wooden block.

The masked executioner tucked the long royal hair beneath a cap,

then stepped back while the prisoner spent his final moments in

prayer. When he was finished, the king stretched out his arms to

signal that he was ready to meet his God, and the ax descended in a

swift arc. The assistant executioner lifted the severed head for all to

see and exclaimed, “Behold, the head of a traitor!”1

Instead of the expected cheer, a long, collective moan issued from

the crowd. Fearing trouble, Cromwell ordered the streets cleared

and his mounted soldiers sprang into action. The spectators pan-

icked and many were trampled in the frenzy, creating even greater

fear of the army and the austere leader of the new government.

Woolsthorpe Manor, a gray stone house situated in England’s

county of Lincoln, was a lonely place seven years before the king’s


death as civil war spread and Christmas drew near. Its only in-

habitants were a young widow named Hannah Newton and her

servant. Hannah’s husband Isaac, a yeoman, or prosperous farmer,

had died in October at the age of thirty-six and was buried in the

churchyard of the village of Colsterworth just across the river

Witham, which was visible from the upstairs bedrooms. Isaac and

Hannah had been married for only five months before he had taken

ill. When he failed to get better, a lawyer was summoned and a

will drawn up. Most of his possessions, including one hundred

acres of land, the manor house, livestock, grain, and household

furnishings, were left to Hannah. Like his father before him, Isaac

Newton was unlettered, so he signed the document with the tra-

ditional “X.”2 No mention was made of the unborn child Hannah

was carrying.

Hannah went into labor sometime on December 24, 1642. It

was the time of the full moon, and the baby was born an hour or

two after midnight on Christmas morning. He was so frail that

two women who attended Hannah were sent to obtain some medi-

cine from a neighbor. Instead of hurrying, they sat down to rest

on the way, thinking the child would already be dead. In the years

to come Hannah would tell her son that he was so tiny when he

was born that he would have fit into a quart pot. Moreover, he was

too weak to hold his head upright for feeding and breathing. A

special collar was fitted to his small neck to support his head; for

a long time he remained much smaller than boys his own age and

even after maturity, he was somewhat shorter than the average

Englishman of his day.

One week later, mother and child were driven to the family

church at Colsterworth, where relatives and friends gathered to

see the infant baptized. The pastor dutifully recorded the event


in the parish register: “Isaac son of Isaac and Hannah Newton

baptized Jan. 1, [1643].”3

Isaac was still a toddler when his mother caught the eye of an

elderly widower named Barnabas Smith, rector of North Witham,

a hamlet little more than a mile southeast of Woolsthorpe. Smith

held bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Oxford University and

was very wealthy, thanks to a substantial inheritance from his father.

Before Hannah would accept the clergyman’s marriage proposal,

she insisted that he make a gift of some property to her son and

remodel Woolsthorpe Manor, which Isaac was expected to occupy

one day as a gentleman farmer. Smith agreed and the marriage took

place in January 1646, a month after Isaac’s third birthday.

For reasons unknown, it was decided that Isaac should remain

at Woolsthorpe in the care of his maternal grandparents, the

Ayscoughs. The devastated child, who had never set eyes on his

father, was suddenly parted from his mother. As he grew older, he

discovered how agonizingly close she remained; by climbing a

tree he could view the steeple of North Witham’s church in the

distance. There was Hannah, but there too was the mysterious

stranger who had “stolen” her away. The loss ate at him like an

emotional cancer. As a teenager, while undergoing a period of in-

tense religious awareness, Isaac compiled a list of “sins” he had

committed over the years. Most were harmless, but number thir-

teen is quite revealing: “Threatening my father and mother Smith

to burn them and the house over them.” The next entry is equally

disturbing: “Wishing death and hoping it to some.”4 The aban-

doned son not only possessed a volatile temper, but he nursed

grudges and would wait years, if need be, to gain revenge on those

he believed had wronged him.

Besides his absent parents, the unstated “some” for whom Isaac

wished death may have included his two half sisters and his half


brother, all fathered by Smith while in his late sixties. Mary,

Hannah, and Benjamin were additional rivals for his mother’s at-

tention. When Smith finally died in 1653, Hannah, now a very

wealthy widow, returned to Woolsthorpe with the three children

in tow. By this time eleven-year-old Isaac had long since learned

to insulate himself from human contact by withdrawing into the

hidden recesses of his mind.

Hannah was determined that Isaac, unlike his father, should

grow up literate. During her absence, he was enrolled in a village

school to which he walked back and forth each day. Then, a year

after Hannah returned to Woolsthorpe, the twelve-year-old youth

entered King’s School at Grantham, a market town some seven

miles away.

Latin and Greek were the languages of instruction, and during

this period the foundations of young Newton’s classical educa-

tion were laid. Bible studies were also an important part of the

curriculum, and Isaac became familiar with Hebrew script.

Though grammar and literature were the main focus, students

also received a limited amount of instruction in arithmetic. Isaac

may have been introduced to geometry during this period as well,

but, if so, there is no record of it in his surviving notebooks.

Arrangements were made for the youth to board in the home

of William Clarke, the local apothecary, whose wife was a close

friend of Isaac’s mother. The Clarkes lived in the middle of

Grantham on High Street and by all accounts gave their young

boarder as much freedom as good judgment would allow. Accord-

ing to Dr. William Stukeley, a Grantham native whom Newton

befriended years later when the two were living in London, “Ev-

eryone that knew Sir Isaac recounts the pregnancy of his parts

when a boy, his strange inventions and extraordinary inclination

for mechanics.” Instead of playing with the other boys after school,


he “busied himself in making knicknacks and wood models in

many kinds: for which purpose he had got little saws, hatchets,

hammers and a whole shop of tools, which he would use with

great dexterity.”5

Isaac visited the construction site of a windmill and was in-

spired to build a working model of his own. When it was finished,

a mouse he called the “miller” was placed inside and supplied

with a ration of corn. In reaching for the food, the miller set a

wheel in motion, which in turn propelled the mill.

The lad was equally fascinated by kites, which he fashioned from

paper in various shapes to determine the designs best suited for

sustained flight. He also made lanterns from crumpled paper and

lit them with candles while walking to school on dark winter morn-

ings. These he sometimes tied to the tails of his kites at night, fright-

ening the country people who mistook them for passing comets.

Smaller and physically weaker than most of his schoolmates,

Isaac attempted to teach them “to play philosophically,” in

Stukeley’s words.6 When the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell died

in September 1658, a great storm swept over England, giving rise

to the superstition that it was the devil riding the whirlwind to

claim his lost soul. Taking advantage of a rare opportunity, Isaac

entered into a competition with several of the more athletic youths

to see who could jump the farthest. By carefully timing the gusts

of wind, he outleaped the other boys, much to their surprise and

embarrassment. Many years later, Newton remarked to a relative

that this was one of his first experiments.

This early interest in the force of moving air was matched by a

deep fascination with time. Even before Isaac entered King’s

School, he had undertaken a study of the sun’s motion, tracking

its path across the yard, walls, and slate roof of Woolsthorpe


Manor. Using a sharp instrument, he carved two sundials next to

a window on the building’s south face. He did the same on the

side of the Clarke house in Grantham, marking the hours and half

hours with pegs. According to Stukeley, “Anybody knew what

o’clock it was by Isaac’s dial, as they ordinarily called it.”7 Later in

life, it was said of Newton that he could tell time by glimpsing the

positions of shadows on his study walls, and that these observa-

tions were as accurate as the dials of his pocket watch.

The most frequently mentioned of his many mechanical mod-

els was his water clock, constructed from a wooden box given to

him by William Clarke’s brother-in-law. It stood four feet high

and had a dial at the top with the numbers of the hours. The de-

vice was driven by a piece of wood, which alternately rose and fell

according to the rhythmic dripping of water. It was kept in the

room where he lived and was occasionally checked by the Clarkes

to see what hour it was. Like the youthful Leonardo da Vinci and

Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton was not simply an aimless child-

hood tinkerer but a tinkerer playing with ideas and mechanisms.

Isaac lived in the Clarkes’ attic, where he covered the walls with

charcoal sketches he drew from prints as well as from life. These

included the beheaded King Charles I, who had died when New-

ton was not yet seven; the metaphysical poet and clergyman John

Donne; and the headmaster of King’s School, Henry Stokes. Birds,

beasts, ships, and mathematical schemes filled the remaining

space, together with verses attributed to the youth himself, an in-

terest that would soon pass.

There is good reason to believe that Isaac also spent many hours

in the company of his landlord, while the apothecary mixed medi-

cines for Grantham’s citizens. One of many books that captured

Isaac’s attention was The Mysteries of Nature and Art by John


Bate, the third edition of which was published in 1654, when Isaac

was eleven. Bate’s recipes for mixing paints and treating common

ailments found their way into the boy’s early notebooks, as did

information on diseases and their cures copied from Francis

Gregory’s catalog titled Nomenclatura. Among the least appe-

tizing is a recipe for an abscess: “Drink twice or thrice a day a

small portion of mint and wormwood and 300 millipedes well

beaten (with their heads pulled off ) suspended in 4 gallons of ale

in fermentation.”8

In light of his interest in books and all things mechanical, one

would have expected Isaac to do well in his studies, but that was

not the case. Henry Stokes put him in the lowest form, where he

ranked second to last out of more than eighty students. Newton

himself later admitted that he “continued very negligent” in his

studies at King’s School.

As the story goes, events took a radical turn one morning as

Isaac was walking to class. The boy ranked just above him kicked

him in the stomach, which provoked thoughts of revenge. When

school was over for the day, Isaac challenged his classmate to a

fight, and they went into the nearby churchyard to settle their dif-

ferences. Though smaller than his opponent, Isaac fought with

greater determination, beating his attacker until he capitulated

by declaring that he would fight no more. He then rubbed the

defeated boy’s face against the church wall for good measure. Still

this was not enough. Isaac began applying himself to his studies

and soon rose to become the top student in the school.

The Grantham years were among the happiest in Newton’s life,

but Hannah had decided that they must come to an end. Her son

was about fifteen when she informed Master Stokes that Isaac must

return to Woolsthorpe to begin learning the ways of a respected

landowner.


Stokes was appalled. Isaac had convinced the headmaster that

his talents were too great to be wasted in the isolated countryside

of Lincolnshire. Nor could Isaac see himself as one of the simple

folk who were his people, for he had gradually ceased to share

their lives. To return to the family farm would mean a life of men-

tal boredom that could easily lead to frustration and bitterness, if

not abject depression.

Hannah was adamant, thus setting the stage for a conflict of

wills. Isaac returned home and later recorded some of his acts of

defiance in the list of his sins compiled a few years later. He was

“peevish with [his] mother” and refused to go into the fields at

her command. He allowed the sheep to stray onto the property of

a neighbor, causing damages that an embarrassed Hannah had to

pay for in court. Stukeley learned that “his chief delight was to sit

under a tree, with a book in his hands, or to busy himself with his

knife in cutting wood for models of something or other that struck

his fancy, or he would go to a running stream, and make little

millwheels to put into the water.”9 Not only did the sheep stray

and the wheat go unplanted, but the adolescent often forgot to

return home for meals, a character trait that would resurface in

the adult Newton.

Frustrated and annoyed, Hannah sought to change Isaac’s be-

havior by placing him under the supervision of an elderly servant.

Together they went to Grantham on Saturday mornings to pur-

chase the needed supplies for the farm and to sell the crops raised

in the Woolsthorpe fields. But as soon as they arrived, Isaac would

head for his old room above the apothecary shop, where he passed

the day reading books stored there by his former landlord’s brother

Joseph Clarke, an assistant teacher at King’s School. On other

occasions he simply picked out a comfortable spot under a road-

side hedge where he read until the servant collected him on the

1 0 I S A A C N E W T O N

way home. “No doubt,” Stukeley observed, “the man [com-

plained] of this to his mother.”10 No doubt indeed!

Clearly Isaac was living among the creations of his own mind.

In many ways they were more real to him than anything he en-

countered in the external world. Henry Stokes, who was keeping

close track of his star pupil, finally decided to intercede on Isaac’s

behalf. He visited Hannah at Woolsthorpe and told her what a

great loss it was to bury such a promising intellect on the family

farm. “The only way whereby he could preserve or raise his for-

tune must be by fitting him for the university.”11 The headmaster

even offered to forego the annual forty shilling fee required of all

pupils born more than a mile from Grantham, no small sacrifice

for a man of modest means.

Hannah could be almost as difficult to budge as her oldest son,

forcing Stokes to argue his case several times. In her defense it

must be remembered that her careful plans for Isaac were falling

to pieces, and with them a mother’s dreams. To a woman who

was next to illiterate, land was the only thing that mattered. She

finally turned to her trusted brother William Ayscough for ad-

vice. To her surprise, William sided with Stokes, agreeing that

Isaac should return to school. Her options closed, Hannah reluc-

tantly gave her consent. For better or for worse, her son would go

on to the university.

Isaac’s return to Grantham was welcomed by many, including

Catherine Storer, Clarke’s stepdaughter. She and her two broth-

ers, Arthur and Edward, had grown close to Isaac while living

under the same roof on High Street. As an old woman in her eight-

ies, Catherine was interviewed regarding her famous playmate,

whom she described as “a sober, silent, thinking lad never known

to play with the boys at their silly amusements.” Even more in-

1 1“ T O P L A Y P H I L O S O P H I C A L LY ”

triguing is the suggestion of a romantic attachment to Newton:

“Being brought up together, tis said that he entertained a love for

her, nor does she deny it. But . . . it was incompatible with his

fortunes to marry, perhaps his studies too.”12

What form those studies took during Isaac’s final months of

preparation before departing for Cambridge is unknown. Because

Latin was the language of scholars, Stokes almost certainly grilled

his greatest pupil in the classics one last time. Works by the an-

cient poets Pindar and Ovid survive from Newton’s personal li-

brary; both are inscribed “1659” and both were standard texts in

the schools of the period. He also had the use of Barnabas Smith’s

library of some two or three hundred volumes, mostly religious in

content, which had been given to him by his widowed mother.

These he kept on shelves of his own making in his upstairs bed-

room at Woolsthorpe, the very room in which he would soon la-

bor over some of his most important scientific discoveries and

mathematical formulations.

Finally, in 1661, the moment of departure arrived. Displaying

the pride of a father, Stokes asked eighteen-year-old Isaac to come

to the front of the classroom. With tears in his eyes, the headmas-

ter made a speech praising the young man and urging the other

youths to follow his example. On a window ledge of King’s School,

with the aid of a penknife, Newton left a simple, permanent record

to be gazed upon by later generations of curious admirers: “I.

Newton.”


Two

“ M Y G R E A T E R F R I E N D ”

THOMAS FULLER, A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY SCHOLAR, DESCRIBED

Cambridge’s Trinity College as “the stateliest and most uniform

college in Christendom.”1 On the massive exterior of Trinity’s

Great Gate is a statue of its founder, the legendary King Henry

VIII, whose six wives set a record among English monarchs. It

was from this prospect that Isaac Newton first gazed on the insti-

tution that would be his home for almost forty years. Before him

stood the chapel, the master’s lodge, and the magnificent dining

hall, with its beamed ceilings, minstrels’ gallery, and huge portrait

of Henry, which took six strong men to carry. Beyond the Tudor

Gothic buildings spread “the Backs,” the green expanse border-

ing the Cam River. To someone of Newton’s unworldly back-

ground it must have seemed miraculous and frightening at the

same time.

Newton entered the university as a sizar, one whose financial

circumstances were such that he had to wait tables, run errands

1 3“ M Y G R E A T E R F R I E N D ”

for the fellows, or senior scholars, and waken his wealthier class-

mates before dawn for morning chapel. Despite her considerable

wealth, it appears that Hannah Newton was not going to make

things easy for her wayward son, forcing him to earn his keep.

Equally humiliating was the fact that Newton was going on nine-

teen in the summer of 1661, which meant that he was a year or

two older than most of those whom he served, setting him even

further apart.

As with all undergraduates, he was assigned a tutor, who was

both a teacher and something of a substitute parent. In this case it

was Benjamin Pulleyn, an obscure professor of Greek about

whom little is known. The young scholar once again found him-

self immersed in the classics—the philosophy of Plato and

Aristotle, the art of eloquent communication called rhetoric,

logic, ethics, history, and much more. There were lectures to at-

tend, papers to write, notebooks to keep, including a worn brown

leather volume containing the inscription: “Isaac Newton, Trin-

ity College, Cambridge, 1661.”2

This volume, known to scholars as “the philosophical note-

book,” begins with notes from the works of Aristotle. The beauti-

ful script has been entered with careful attention to detail, as if in

reverence for the most profound mind in ancient history, and per-

haps of all time. Then, suddenly, the reader is met by dozens of

blank pages before encountering a radically different series of en-

tries. At some point in 1663, during his third year at Trinity, New-

ton began a new section, which he titled “Certain Philosophical

Questions.” More important, he penned the following revolution-

ary sentence at the top of the first page: “I am a friend of Plato, I

am a friend of Aristotle, but truth is my greater friend.”3 He made

his own index of the various subjects he planned to investigate.


These range from “Air,”“Earth,” and “Matter” to “Time and Eter-

nity,” “Soul,” and “Sleep.” Some headings contain no further en-

tries, but under others he wrote from a few sentences to many

pages, forsaking his elegant script for the more cramped writing

of a young man in a hurry. He got much of his information from the

works of an emerging group of thinkers who helped shape the mod-

ern worldview, men known as “natural philosophers,” for the term

“scientist” would not be coined until the nineteenth century.

In 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus put forth the

theory that the Earth and the other planets rotate around the sun,

challenging the long-held view that the Earth is the center of the

universe. This drawing, from his work De Revolutionibus, clearly places

the sun at the center of the universe. Lilly Library, University of Indiana


Among those whose work he read was Nicolaus Copernicus

(1473–1543), the Polish astronomer who, in 1543, had challenged

Aristotle and scholarly authority by arguing that the planets, in-

cluding the Earth, circle the sun. By placing the Earth in motion

rather than at rest in the center of the universe, Copernicus had

stood a two-thousand-year-old belief on its head.

Others soon stepped in to confirm mathematically and experi-

mentally what Copernicus had presented as theory. Johannes

Kepler (1571–1630), the brilliant German astronomer who is now

recognized as the first astrophysicist, developed the earliest laws

of planetary motion. Kepler’s first law states that the shape of each

planet’s orbit, or path around the sun, is an ellipse, which re-

sembles a gently squeezed balloon. Thus the sun is somewhat off

center, and a planet’s distance from it varies as it moves about the

medium-sized star.

Having shattered the ancient concept that the planets orbit in

perfect circles, Kepler next demonstrated in his second law that

the speed of a planet is not uniform but varies according to its

distance from the sun. When a planet is farthest from the sun, it

slows down; conversely, as it approaches the sun, it speeds up.

The third law established a relation between the average distance

of a planet from the sun and the time it takes to complete a single

orbit, or period in the language of astronomers. It would remain

for a young Cambridge student to formulate the universal prin-

ciple by which the planets are held in their orbits, but it was

through Kepler’s mind and pen that mathematics—elegant, pre-

cise, and powerful—entered the heavens.

Newton was also reading the works of the Italian genius Galileo

Galilei (1564–1642), who corresponded with Kepler and died in

the very year of Newton’s birth. Most famous for his use of the


telescope, Galileo trained the first of his many homemade instru-

ments on the planets, moon, and stars in 1609. What he saw shook

the awed natural philosopher to his roots: mountains and craters

on the surface of the moon, spots on the sun, the phases of Venus,

the moons of Jupiter. And when he looked beyond these objects

into the great abyss, he discovered the secret of the Milky Way

itself. “The galaxy,” he wrote in his revolutionary little treatise

The Starry Messenger, “is, in fact, nothing but a congeries of in-

According to the first two laws of planetary motion developed by the

German astronomer Johannes Kepler, the planets move around the sun

in elliptical orbits and an orbiting planet sweeps over equal areas in

equal times. When the planet is far from the sun and moving slower,

the pie slice is long and narrow (SCD); when the planet is near the sun

and moving faster, the pie slice is short and wide (SAB). Diagram byGary Tong


numerable stars grouped together in clusters. Many of them are

rather large and quite bright, while the number of smaller ones is

quite beyond calculation.” As Copernicus had implied by mak-

ing the Earth a planet, the heavens and the sphere inhabited by

humankind are not fundamentally different but are made of the

same matter and subject to the same laws.

In 1633 Galileo was condemned by the Roman Catholic

Church for teaching what was termed “the Copernican doctrine,”

which conflicted with the teachings of the Bible. Though he was

not tortured or imprisoned, as were others who challenged spiri-

tual authority, he was placed under house arrest for his remaining

years, during which he continued to work while going blind from

glaucoma.

Newton was no less interested in Galileo’s other claim to fame,

the experimental method that led to the overthrow of Aristotle’s

theories. While Kepler was formulating his laws of planetary mo-

tion, Galileo developed laws governing the motion of bodies here

on Earth. As a professor at the University of Pisa, he found the

ancient belief that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones to be

erroneous. In a series of carefully timed experiments, he was able

to show that the acceleration of a falling body is proportional to

time and independent of its weight and density. Thus a feather and

a cannonball dropped together would reach the ground at the very

same time were it not for the resistance of air. This can be demon-

strated by employing an airless container, or vacuum chamber.

Moreover, Galileo successfully challenged the time-honored

belief that an object at rest is in its natural state. Rather, he postu-

lated, it is natural for an object in motion to continue moving in a

straight line, a principle known as inertia. This concept applies

equally to a rolling ball on Earth or the circling planet itself. Only


when acted upon by some form of resistance do such objects

change speed or direction.

Newton was intoxicated by all that he was reading and was pre-

occupied as much by the behavior of the tiniest objects as by the

largest. He embraced those teachings of the ancients that made

sense to him, such as the theory of matter set forth by the Greek

philosopher Democritus in the fourth century B.C. Democritus

held that all things are composed of minute, invisible particles he

called atoms. They contain the same matter as larger bodies but

differ in size, weight, and shape. According to the philosopher,

the constant movement of these whirling particles resulted in the

formation of the world and universe as we know it. As Newton

wrote in his notebook, “the first matter must be atoms and that

matter may be so small as to be indiscernible.”4

The Trinity notebook further demonstrates that Newton, true

to the natural philosopher he was to be, distrusted the senses on

which Aristotle and his followers relied. He had already taken a

deep interest in the experimental method advocated by Galileo.

The senses of different individuals are affected differently by the

same phenomena. Newton wrote, “The nature of things is more

securely and naturally deduced from their operations on one an-

other than upon the senses; our explanation of both soul and body”

must not be colored by either.5 From then on, when addressing

questions to nature, he would embrace the new scientific method

and its fundamental steps: gather data, formulate a hypothesis,

conduct experiments, validate or reject the hypothesis.

Even as he was studying the works of the new natural philoso-

phers, Newton was practicing science on his own. Fascinated by

celestial phenomena, he began tracking comets across the starry

sky. He observed the first in December 1664 at 4:30 in the morn-


ing, while the rest of the university slept. Another appeared in

early April 1665, causing him to wonder how these brilliant ob-

jects could move across the firmament with such speed.

Though possessed of an iron will and a physical constitution

to match, even Newton had his limits. He later informed John

Conduitt, a relative by marriage, that he was so obsessed with

nightly observing that he became “much disordered and learned

to go to bed betimes.”6 John North, Master of Trinity, observed of

Newton that “if he had not wrought with his hands making ex-

periments, he had killed himself with study.”7

Newton not only courted exhaustion and illness, but risked

his eyesight in the interest of science as well. Capturing the sun’s

image in a looking glass, he observed its rays with his right eye

and then turned away. He saw circles of colors, which gradually

vanished. Growing bolder, he looked at the sun a second and a

third time with both eyes. Suddenly its multicolored imprint over-

lay every object upon which he gazed, from an open book to a

passing cloud. The condition gradually worsened, forcing New-

ton to shut himself up in his darkened rooms for several days. “I

. . . used all means to direct my imagination from the sun. For if I

thought upon him I presently saw his picture though I was in the

dark.”8 Gradually his sight returned, but even months later,

whenever he thought of the sun, its spectrum reappeared

“though I lay in bed at midnight with my curtains drawn.” When

he had sufficiently recovered to take pen in hand, the lingering

affliction was duly written up in the philosophical notebook in

ten carefully worded steps, a testament to the experimenter’s ex-

traordinary self-control.

By 1664 Newton’s lifework was pretty much determined. He

had joined the intellectual company of those who believed that


the universe, like the great clocks adorning the bell towers of me-

dieval cities, is governed by rational mechanical laws and that

nature’s secrets will be revealed to those employing the scientific

method. Yet neither did he think that such precision is the result

of blind chance. Behind it all he sensed the presence of intelligent

planning and purposeful direction. Under the heading “Of God,”

he wrote, “Were men and beasts made by fortuitous jumblings of

atoms there would be many parts useless in them, here a lump of

flesh there a member too much. Some kinds of beasts might have

had but one eye some more than two.”9 Above all, this was a re-

minder to himself that nature’s underlying unity is a product of

the Divine Mind. Atoms and mechanical laws, no matter how fas-

cinating, are as nothing when compared to the knowledge and

wisdom of the Creator.

Newton the mathematician makes no appearance in the philo-

sophical notebook, yet we know from other sources that he was

deeply immersed in the study of numbers during this period.

According to Abraham de Moivre, a French mathematician and

future member of Newton’s inner circle, the young Newton vis-

ited Sturbridge fair while a Trinity undergraduate and bought a

book on astrology out of curiosity. He read until he came to an

illustration of the heavens he could not understand for a lack of

trigonometry. In turn, he bought a text on trigonometry but could

not fully grasp its contents, forcing him to seek out the work of

the ancient geometrician Euclid, which seemed absurdly simple.

But he soon realized that he had underestimated Euclid’s proofs

and read the book with greater care a second time. He next gradu-

ated to William Oughtred’s treatise Key to Mathematics and René

Descartes’s seminal work on analytical geometry, Discourse onMethod, which, according to de Moivre, “he found very difficult


and had to master by degrees.”10 He went back over all that he

had read one more time before striking out to claim new territory

of his own.

Nowhere is there any mention of a guiding hand, thus leading

one to believe that Newton alone was responsible for his math-

ematical education, as for so much else. Pulleyn, his tutor and a

professor of Greek, could have provided at best a measure of en-

couragement but little, if any, instruction in this field. On at least

two occasions in later life, Newton commented on self-education

in mathematics and natural philosophy in a manner too sugges-

tive of his own experience to be dismissed as coincidence. He

had begun his great quest alone and he would end it the same

way, cut off from the interests of the less gifted, locked up in a

private world of protective isolation. The British naturalist Charles

Darwin knew this world as well. Among Darwin’s most reward-

ing experiences was tramping across the highlands of South

America in the silent company of illiterate natives: “The whole of

my pleasure was derived from what passed in my mind,” he wrote

in his journal. And when, after he had grown old and was re-

vered like a god, Newton was asked how he had made his dis-

coveries, he replied, “Truth is the offspring of silence and

unbroken meditation.”11

The one person who seems to have pierced that silence was

John Wickins, son of the master of Manchester Grammar School.

Wickins told his son Nicholas about his chance encounter with

Newton while the two were undergraduates at Trinity. A dejected

Wickins had left his rooms to go for a walk one day after an argu-

ment with his boisterous roommate. Once outside, he encoun-

tered an equally dejected Newton, who was experiencing the very

same problem: “They thereupon agreed to shake off their present


disorderly companions and chum together, which they did as soon

as conveniently they could and so continued as long as my Father

stayed at college.”12 This relationship lasted almost twenty years.

Unfortunately, John Wickins never recorded his invaluable memo-

ries of the most creative period in Newton’s life.

Content in their quarters, Newton and Wickins disdained the

drinking, gambling, and other antics common among their fellow

students. But while Newton confessed to no significant sins of

the flesh in his 1662 list of transgressions, he did admit to “set-

ting my heart on money” more than God. This was followed by a

further confession that he had suffered “a relapse.”

After he celebrated his twenty-first birthday in 1663, the con-

siderable profits from the land deeded to him by the Reverend

Smith were his to do with as he pleased. No longer a waiter on

tables or an errand runner, Newton the budding natural philoso-

pher became Newton the student moneylender. The philosophi-

cal notebook contains a list of his accounts, and judging by the

number of clients he served business was thriving. Being the con-

servative that he was, he only once lent as much as a pound, not-

ing that the sum was “to be paid on Friday.”13 It’s unclear how

much interest he charged. But since the moneylender has never

been a popular figure in society, this practice doubtless only served

to set Newton further apart from his fellow students.

In 1664 he passed the required scholarship examinations, rid-

ding himself of the distasteful title of “sizar.” Officially declared a

“scholar,” he was now entitled to receive free meals from his col-

lege in addition to a regular stipend. Even more important, he

could remain at Trinity to take his master’s degree and, if all went

well, extend his residence at Cambridge indefinitely by obtaining

a fellowship, a plan shared by the steadfast Wickins.


At this point Catherine Storer’s little remaining hope of mar-

rying her childhood sweetheart vanished forever, and she accepted

the proposal of a Grantham attorney named Francis Bakon. Still

Newton remained her friend through the years, visiting her when-

ever he returned to Lincolnshire, sometimes bearing small gifts.

Less than a year after being made scholar, Newton, together

with his fellow candidates for the B.A., took the centuries-old

examinations that constituted the last hurdle before gaining a de-

gree. Based mostly on the teachings of ancient and medieval think-

ers, the exams placed a premium on oral debate and logic. As a

student at Cambridge a generation later, William Stukeley heard

that Newton was put in second place, “which is looked upon as

disgraceful.” Yet, as Stukeley noted, this was hardly out of charac-

ter: “It seems no strange thing, notwithstanding Sir Isaac’s great

parts, for we may well suppose him too busy in the solid part of

learning to allow much time to be master of words only, or the

trifling niceties of logic, which universities still make the chiefest

qualification for a degree.”14

Whatever the truth of the matter, Newton and twenty-five other

Trinity men took their degrees in the spring of 1665. While he

may have done poorly on the outdated exams, the Trinity note-

book stands as proof that truth was indeed his “greater friend,”

that at Cambridge Isaac Newton had found his genius.


Three

O F G E N I U S , F I R E ,A N D P L A G U E

NEWTON HAD NO SOONER GRADUATED FROM CAMBRIDGE THAN HE

was forced to leave the university and return to Woolsthorpe,

though not of his own choosing. In London, where the city’s rap-

idly increasing population had reached half a million by 1660,

people were suddenly taken ill. The disease began with a severe

headache and dizziness, followed by trembling in the limbs, swell-

ing under the arms and in the groins, raging fever, and, finally,

telltale dark splotches on the skin, which the widely read London

cleric Thomas Vincent described as “tokens of near approaching

death. Within a few hours they must go down into the dust.”1

The infamous Black Death, or bubonic plague, had first ap-

peared in Europe in 1347, carried from the Middle East by ship

rats in whose fur infected fleas lay hidden. Once a rat succeeded

in reaching shore, its parasites were easily transferred to a human

host, launching a deadly epidemic. Since there was no known cure

for the disease, lord, serf, merchant, and beggar alike fell victim.

2 5O F G E N I U S , F I R E , A N D P L A G U E

In some areas, well over half the population died; commerce and

agriculture came to a halt; cities and towns were deserted; wolves

reclaimed the silent streets.

Aside from ordering that the ill be completely isolated, physi-

cians could do little but invoke an adage often recited by the an-

cient Romans whenever they were menaced by disease: “fly

quickly, go far, return slowly.” Thus, as Samuel Pepys noted in his

celebrated diary, the government abandoned London for the rela-

tive safety of Oxford, and was soon followed by ordinary citizens

who spread across the countryside by the tens of thousands. In

September 1665, as the contagion reached its peak, some eight

thousand deaths were recorded in the city every week. What was

worse, in attempting to save themselves Londoners carried the

plague to the eastern counties, and then to the Midlands. In Oc-

tober, Cambridge University’s Senate voted to close the institu-

tion, but by this time all but a few administrators had fled before

the invisible enemy.

Left to his own devices in rural Lincolnshire, Newton began one

of the greatest intellectual odysseys in the history of modern sci-

ence. Thinking back on the two plague years of 1665 and 1666

decades later, he wrote the French scholar Pierre Des Maizeaux,

“For in those days I was in the prime of my age of invention and

minded mathematics and philosophy more than at any time since.”2

William Whiston, a future friend and disciple of Newton, wrote

that “Sir Isaac, in mathematics, could sometimes see almost by

intuition, even without demonstration and when he did propose

conjectures in natural philosophy, he almost always knew them to

be true at the same time.”3

Having mastered the works of the most advanced mathemati-

cians of his day, Newton was far from satisfied. Algebra was fine


for determining the numerical answer to specific conditions set

forth in an equation; geometry served to determine the relation-

ships of points, lines, and angles. But what of more complex ques-

tions involving the ever-changing speed of a moving object and

the constant alteration of that object’s path as its speed changes?

Here the mathematician is faced with two quantities that vary con-

tinuously, the one with the other, and must determine the rates of

variation for any given moment in time.

Others had tackled such numbing problems in the past, and

with some measure of success. The French mathematicians René

Descartes and Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665) had solved indi-

vidual problems of this nature, but at the cost of elegance and

simplicity. The methods they employed were too cumbersome

for general use. Nor had they succeeded in devising a general

method that could be applied to all problems of a given type, the

stuff of which the great mathematicians dream.

Newton composed his first major mathematical paper at Cam-

bridge in May 1665, shortly before the university closed its doors.

He completed a second, more advanced paper at Woolsthorpe in

November and three others during the feverish year 1666. His work

involved a revolutionary method he termed “fluxions,” or quanti-

ties subject to constant rates of change. By late 1666 Isaac Newton,

who was approaching his twenty-fourth birthday, had become the

most advanced mathematician the world had yet known. With his

fluxions, or what we now call calculus, a mathematician can solve

problems in which quantities and motions are not definite and un-

changing but in the process of originating, fluctuating, even disap-

pearing. With these equations Newton could determine the most

minute variations in the acceleration of a body as it falls through

space, compute the precise arc of a revolving planet, or measure the


exact rate in the slowing of a ball as it inches to a stop after being

rolled across the ground. In sum, calculus is a most effective tool

both for resolving problems concerning the smallest—or what New-

ton himself termed “infinitesimal”—variations in the rate of motion

of a given body and for determining its path through space. Recog-

nizing the need for the utmost precision in our dealings with na-

ture, he had surpassed all others by formulating a mathematical

method that deals with nature on its own terms.

Not surprisingly, this newly discovered power thrilled the young

man who possessed it. When he visited the nearby home of

Humphrey Babington, an older Cambridge scholar who may have

helped him get into the university, Newton brought his papers

with him. His excitement on solving one mathematical problem

was so great that he carried out the division to fifty-five places,

and might have continued on had not the long line of zeros liter-

ally overflowed the edge of the page. Yet where others would have

shouted their victory to the mathematical world, Newton remained

curiously silent. Proof to him was sufficient unto itself; the rest of

the world did not matter, at least for the time being.

While at Woolsthorpe waiting for Cambridge to reopen, New-

ton experienced the insight that has since become legend. A year

before Newton died in 1727, his friend William Stukeley visited

him at his home in Kensington near London. After dining, they

went into the garden to drink tea under the shade of some apple

trees. “Amidst other discourse,” Stukeley wrote, “he told me he

was just in the same situation as when formerly the notion of gravi-

tation came into his mind. It was occasioned by the fall of an apple,

as he sat in a contemplative mood.”4

It had occurred to Newton that the power of gravity does not

seem to decrease significantly as an object moves away from the


center of the Earth. If it remains the same on the highest moun-

tain and atop the loftiest building, “Why not as high as the moon?”

he said to himself. If this is true, the moon must be influenced by

this mysterious force, “perhaps she is retained in her orbit

thereby.”5 What is true of the moon as it orbits Earth must also be

true of the planets as they circle the sun. And why not the glim-

mering stars beyond?

Having read Galileo and Descartes, Newton was well ac-

quainted with the principle of inertia, which holds that once a

body is set in motion it will not rest unless acted upon by some

external force. He also knew that a body in motion will move in a

straight line unless it is diverted somehow. Thus, he conjectured

that the natural motion of a ball—or an apple—set in motion would

carry it away from Earth, outward into the abyss. But something

happens: gravity intervenes, altering the object’s course and bring-

ing it to ground.

Instead of throwing a ball, Newton thought of shooting it from

a cannon. In this instance it would travel a much greater distance,

yet, as when thrown, it would eventually return to Earth. He

dreamed of even bigger cannons and larger arcs, and drew sketches

to demonstrate how the object would travel farther and farther

around the Earth until, finally, it would leave the planet and settle

into orbit, like the moon.

Newton was immediately faced with another problem. While

the power of gravity does not appear to diminish as one moves

away from the Earth’s center, this must be an illusion. Were it not

so the moon would surely crash into the planet, while the Earth

itself, together with Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn,

would careen into the sun. Only if gravity decreases at a distance

can this celestial balancing act be maintained.


Envisioning the moon as a

giant apple, Newton developed

the idea of how gravity works. The

satellite’s tendency to move away from

Earth in a straight line is counteracted by the inward pull of grav-

ity, which produces an orbit, much as an object on a string when

it is whirled around one’s head. The moon is perfectly balanced

between the tendency to move outward—or what is termed cen-

trifugal force—and the inward pull of Earth.

At this point Newton immersed himself in mathematical cal-

culations, most of which are lost, in an attempt to determine the

force sufficient to keep the moon in its orbit. In another brilliant

insight, he did not assume the Earth to be the lone actor in this

celestial drama. Any object, he had come to believe, has the power

to attract any other object. An apple attracts the Earth just as the

Earth attracts an apple, although the planet’s size is so great that

the principle challenges common sense. And what is true of the

apple is equally true of the moon.

Newton believed that the attraction between the Earth and the

moon must decrease inversely as the square of the distance sepa-

rating them. Hence, if this attraction amounts to a certain force

when the bodies are at a given distance from each other, at twice

A diagram from Newton’s A Treatise of theSystem of the World, published after his

death, shows that if a projectile is

fired with enough force, it will

remain in orbit around the Earth,

the same way that the moon is in

orbit around the Earth. Libraryof Congress


the distance the force will not be half as great but one-fourth as

great; at three times the distance, not one-third as great but one-

ninth as great, and so on, in ever smaller proportions as the dis-

tance increases. The same formula must apply to the sun and

planets, suggesting that a universal principle is at work. As New-

ton himself later wrote of this period, “I deduced the forces which

keep the planets in their orbs must be reciprocally as the squares

of their distances from the centers about which they revolve.”6

But there were problems. Try as he might, the young genius

could not get his calculations to work out as he had expected.

According to the mathematician William Whiston, in whom New-

ton later confided, “Upon this disappointment . . . Sir Isaac . . .

threw aside the paper of his calculation and went on to other stud-

ies.” “To be looked upon as one of my guesses,” Newton joked

years later after finally achieving the result he was after.7 Ah, but

what a “guess” it was!

Though relatively secure from the plague, which had begun to

subside, Newton remained at Woolsthorpe throughout most of

1666, where, in September, word arrived that another tragedy had

befallen the beleaguered citizens of London. The Great Fire, as it

came to be known, began on September 2, and raged out of con-

trol for four days and four nights. The flames laid waste an area a

mile and a half long and half a mile wide, consuming 436 acres,

more than 13,000 houses, and 87 churches, including beautiful

old St. Paul’s Cathedral. The remains of the city were leveled as

though on a great battleground; a deep and unbroken sea of ashes,

soot, and dirt were all that remained of the London beloved by

Shakespeare and Elizabeth I. Many believed that the fire, like the

Great Plague, was an act of divine retribution brought on by a

God made angry by the sinful ways of his children, a view that


Newton, with his strong puritanical streak, may well have shared.

There was, however, at least one important blessing to be counted

in the fire’s aftermath. While tens of thousands had died from the

plague, the death toll from the fire was miniscule by comparison.

The official Bills of Mortality listed only six people as having per-

ished in the flames.

One casualty of the plague was Sturbridge fair, which Newton

had visited sometime before the epidemic forced its closing. It

was there, he wrote, that “I procured me a triangular glass prism

to try therewith the celebrated phenomena of colors.”8

The prism had been known since the time of the Roman phi-

losopher and statesman Seneca in the first century A.D. But even

before this, Aristotle had argued that colors are a mixture of light

and dark, or of black and white, a view that was still accepted by

most natural philosophers of Newton’s day. It was thought that

red was the strongest, least modified, and closest to pure white of

all the colors, while blue was the weakest, most modified, and clos-

est to black. But no matter what the color from the spectrum—

whether red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, or violet—all

were believed to be modifications of pure white light.

At Woolsthorpe, Newton conceived of a novel experiment.

Darkening his upstairs bedroom, which faced south, he drilled a

one-eighth-inch hole in a shutter and intercepted the beam of in-

coming light with a prism. The resulting spectrum was projected

on the wall across the room, which served as a screen. To his great

surprise, the spectrum took the form of an oblong strip rather

than the perfect circle Descartes said should appear. This could

mean only one thing: each of the seven colors was refracted at

different angles on passing through the prism—red the least and

violet the most, and the other colors in between.


Ever cautious, Newton conceived of a second, equally power-

ful, experiment that he later termed the experimentum crucis, the

crucial test. After placing a prism near the drilled hole, he inter-

cepted the spectrum with a second prism located about “5 or 6

yards from ye former.”9 As with the first prism, blue rays were

bent at a greater angle than the red ones. “The fashion of the

colors was in all cases the same,” he wrote.10 He then realized

that if the angles of the bent colored rays could be accurately

calculated, a new law of refraction could be formulated. He

quickly set about determining these angles, or sines, a further

vindication of his vision that nature operates according to pre-

cise mathematical principles.

The experimentum crucis led to another, equally powerful, in-

sight. Newton observed each ray as it passed through the second

Newton’s drawing of his so-called crucial experiment shows light from

the sun being refracted through one prism and then being refracted

through another prism. The colors never changed. Bodleian Library,Oxford


prism. Just as he suspected, blue remained blue, orange remained

orange, and so forth. He rotated the prism and still each color

remained the same. If colors were nothing but modifications of

white light, as had long been believed, the second prism should

have produced other colors by turning red to orange or blue to

indigo, but it did not. White light, he had proven beyond any rea-

sonable doubt, is made up of all the colors of the spectrum, none

of which are altered on passing through a prism. In the language

of a poet, Isaac Newton had “untwisted the shining robe of day”

and deftly put it back together again.

Looking back over Newton’s achievements more than three

centuries later, historians have termed the Woolsthorpe period

the annus mirabilis—the wondrous year—though the discover-

ies actually took place over the course of two years rather than

one. So far as we know, Newton had not yet communicated any-

thing of what he had learned to another human being. But per-

haps as a way of rewarding himself and pleasing his mother, he

traveled the familiar road to Grantham in 1666. There before the

king’s herald, he signed himself “Isaac Newton of Woolsthorpe,

Gentleman, age 23.”11


Four

T H E R E V O L U T I O N A R Y

P R O F E S S O R

WITH A BACHELOR’S DEGREE IN HAND AND HIS STATUS AS A GENTLEMAN

legally recorded, Newton returned to Cambridge and Trinity

College to complete his master of arts. He now faced the fellow-

ship elections of September and October 1667. If successful, he

could extend his stay at Trinity indefinitely; if not, he would likely

be forced to choose between the life of an obscure gentleman

farmer or the pastorship of a village church in rural Lincolnshire.

For three days during late September, Newton and his fellow

candidates assembled in the chapel to undergo oral questioning.

On the fourth day each of the nine was given a theme by the mas-

ter of Trinity to be completed in writing within a period of six

hours. As when Newton sat for bachelor’s degree exams, the sub-

jects covered were mostly drawn from the writings of ancient Greek

and Roman scholars. On October 1, “by ye tolling of ye little bell,”

the successful candidates were called back to the chapel. The bell

tolled for Newton, who, together with his trusted companion John

3 5T H E R E V O L U T I O N A R Y P R O F E S S O R

Wickins, swore to embrace the “true religion of Christ.” Now of-

ficially a Fellow of the college, Newton had been granted perma-

nent citizenship in the academic community. Never again would

he have to face the unsettling prospect of being wrenched from

the labors for which he was so admirably suited.

Together with Wickins, Newton celebrated—one of the few

times in his life that he did so. The two hired a painter and a car-

penter to refurbish their living quarters and then ordered new

carpets and furniture, including a couch and “ticking for a feath-

erbed.” Newton also took an interest in his appearance and spent

heavily on suits and shoes during the next two years. Added to

this was the cost of a bachelor’s gown, followed by an even larger

expenditure for a tailor-made master’s gown a year later. As was

the custom, Newton shelled out seventeen shillings to celebrate

his B.A. and spent fifteen more when he became master of arts

on July 7, 1668. In between he recorded being “at the tavern

several other times,” where he even lost fifteen shillings playing

cards. Then, after entertaining his “cousin Ayscough” and an uni-

dentified acquaintance, these expenditures ended as abruptly as

they began.1 By all indications, Newton had returned to his soli-

tary ways.

Not until August 1668, a month after he received his master’s

degree, did Newton first visit London. Although reconstruction

was well under way, nearly four-fifths of the city still lay in ruin, a

blackened monument to the massive devastation wrought by the

Great Fire. Where he stayed and how he occupied his seven weeks

in the capital remain minor mysteries, but he likely purchased

books and supplies for his small laboratory and perhaps met cer-

tain mathematicians and natural philosophers whose works had

inspired his scientific research.


Thus far the only scholar who knew anything of Newton’s bril-

liance was Isaac Barrow, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at

Cambridge. This unusual academic had traveled throughout the

Mediterranean and the Middle East, besting a “loose-tongued

Turk” in hand-to-hand combat and bravely repelling an attack on

his ship by Maltese pirates. A preacher by training if not neces-

sarily by temperament, a heavy smoker, and slovenly in dress,

Barrow nurtured a keen interest in optics, analytical geometry, and

the mechanical model of the universe.

Newton recalled having been in the audience when Barrow gave

the first of his Lucasian lectures in 1664, and allowed that Barrow

may have stimulated his interest in advanced mathematics, but

nothing more. Yet, it’s possible that Newton visited Barrow in his

quarters during the weekly hours set aside for discussing matters

raised in his lectures, and that Barrow lent the student books from

his personal library. Yet Stukeley tells us that during the scholar-

ship examinations of April 1664, Dr. Barrow found that Newton

had neglected Euclid and “conceived then but an indifferent opin-

ion of him.”2

Whatever the nature of their early relationship, by 1669 Bar-

row was well aware of Newton’s unique mathematical gifts. Upon

receiving of a copy of Nicholas Mercator’s new treatise, Logarithmo-technia (The Art of Logarithms), from the London mathematical

intermediary John Collins, Barrow drafted an enthusiastic reply,

which struck Collins like a bolt from the blue: “A friend of mine

here, that hath a very excellent genius to these things, brought me

the other day some paper, wherein he has set down methods of

calculating the dimensions of magnitudes like that of Mr. Mercator

concerning the hyperbola, but very general.”3 The unidentified

friend, of course, was Isaac Newton, and the paper referred to


was his little treatise De Analysi per Aequationes Infinitas (On

Analysis by Infinite Series), which Barrow promised to forward

in his next letter.

It was with much difficulty that Barrow persuaded Newton to

present his work to the scholarly world. This seems all the more

strange because Newton’s very purpose in drafting De Analysi was

to establish his rightful priority to the method published by

Mercator. An anxious Collins had to wait two weeks before he

received the promised material, and still Newton’s name was not

revealed. Only after Collins replied in the most enthusiastic terms

did Barrow respond: “I am glad my friend’s paper giveth you so

much satisfaction. His name is Mr. Newton, a fellow of our col-

lege, and very young . . . but of an extraordinary genius and profi-

ciency in these things.”4 Barrow, with Newton’s permission,

allowed Collins to show the paper to Lord Brouncker, president

of the Royal Society, and additional copies were made for circula-

tion among several of Collins’s associates. Under no circum-

stances, however, would the naturally secretive Newton allow a

frustrated Collins to publish his work. Not until 1711, when New-

ton was sixty-eight, did De Analysi, one of the earliest examples

of his revolutionary fluxions, reach print.

The belief that Barrow had been keeping an eye on the bud-

ding Newton for some time is further borne out by the Lucasian

professor’s request that Newton help him edit his forthcoming

book on optics. Whether Barrow was aware of Newton’s recent

discoveries in this field remains another mystery. Since his own

work was still in the experimental stage, Newton may have cho-

sen not to dampen Barrow’s spirits by discussing experiments

that, if confirmed, would render the professor’s work obsolete.

Moreover, Newton was in quest of a major plum and wanted to


do nothing to jeopardize his chances. Barrow had always consid-

ered himself to be more of a theologian than a natural philoso-

pher, so when the opportunity arose to become chaplain to King

Charles II, he jumped at it. Shortly before Barrow’s departure for

London, and doubtless as a result of his considerable influence,

Isaac Newton was appointed Cambridge’s second Lucasian Pro-

fessor of Mathematics on October 29, 1669.

Newton was only twenty-seven years old, but his shoulder-

length hair was already turning a beautiful silver. Wearing the scar-

let robes of his new position, he strode across Trinity’s Great Court

to deliver the first of his lectures in early 1670, no doubt turning

some heads along the way. Free to choose among a broad range of

subjects, he selected optics, his first and greatest love among the

experimental sciences. “I judge,” he began, that “it will not be

unacceptable if I bring the principles of this science to a more

strict examination.”5

The work with prisms that Newton had undertaken during the

mid-1660s had been refined with a passion put to use. As reported

by the Scottish physician Dr. George Cheyne, when Newton was

carrying on his investigations into light and colors, “to quicken

his faculties and fix his attention, [he] confined himself to a small

quantity of bread, during all the time, with a little sack and water,

of which he took as he found a craving or failure of spirits.”6

Three years’ additional labor now enabled Newton “to bring

forth [his] opinion more distinctly.”7 This he did in a series of

eight lectures delivered before an audience that dwindled rapidly

after his first address. Indeed, none of his colleagues or students

at Trinity left a record of having been in attendance, a symptom of

the general lack of interest in the new science. Even Barrow, a popu-

lar figure on campus, had taught only a handful of followers dur-


ing his five years in the Lucasian chair, sometimes lecturing to an

empty room. If Newton’s revolutionary discovery that sunlight is

a mixture of all the rainbow colors was to reach a wider audience,

he would have to communicate it to a world beyond Trinity’s pro-

tective walls.

Among the books he had acquired as a young man was a copy

of Optica Promota (The Promotion of Optics) by James Gregory,

the distinguished Scottish mathematician and astronomer. As was

his habit, Newton dog-eared the passages most important to him,

including Gregory’s design for the reflecting telescope. As yet, no

one had successfully built a working reflector. In 1663 Gregory

himself had gone so far as to order a special lens from Richard

Reive, London’s leading instrument maker, but Reive had failed

in his attempts to produce the delicate object.

Newton took up the challenge a few years later, and his reason

for doing so is not difficult to understand. Unlike the refracting

telescope, which forms an image of an object with lenses, the re-

flector contains a parabolic mirror from which all light is reflected

at the same angle. The advantage of this design is that the ob-

server is not hindered by chromatic aberration, the hazy, rainbow-

like phenomena produced when rays of different wavelengths are

not brought to the same focus on passing through a lens. Though

no one but Newton realized it at the time, the reflecting telescope,

in producing an image free from distortion, offered further sup-

port for his theory of light and colors.

With the same skilled hands that had produced the models

and clocks of his youth, Newton set to work. Using a thin piece of

metal rather than glass, which is almost impossible to grind evenly

with hand tools, he created a hollow in the shape of a saucer.

He then prepared a special alloy composed of copper, tin, and


arsenic, which is white in color and takes a high polish. When

this tedious task was completed, he coated the metal mirror, or

speculum, and placed it and other components in a small tube. In a

letter to an unnamed friend, dated February 23, 1669, he described

its performance. Newton calculated that the instrument was capable

of magnifying “about 40 times in diameter which is more than

any 6 foot tube can do, I believe with distinctness. I have seen with

it Jupiter distinctly round and his satellites.” He had no doubt that

a carefully crafted six-foot reflector would perform as well as any

“60 or 100 foot tube made after the common way.” Realizing how

puzzling this claim might sound, he added, “It may seem a para-

doxical assertion, yet it is the necessary consequence of some ex-

periments which I have made concerning the nature of light.”8

Word of Newton’s triumph spread to London, where he was

erroneously hailed as the inventor of the reflector. This circum-

stance was reminiscent of 1609, when Galileo constructed the first

refracting telescope in Italy from a description sent to him by a

scientific correspondent from abroad. Most anxious to see

Newton’s telescope were members of the Royal Society, a scien-

tific order founded in 1660 and chartered by none other than King

Charles II. The society took as its motto part of the Latin quota-

tion Nullius in verba, which freely translates, “Not by word of

mouth.” Its membership, which included the finest scientific

minds of the time, both English and foreign, were pledged to the

experimental method as opposed to the ancient practice of ob-

servation alone. The society’s findings were regularly published

in the renowned Philosophical Transactions, which became the

model for other scientific journals—even to the present day.

This time Newton found the urging of his peers impossible to

resist. He constructed a new, somewhat modified version of his


first reflector and turned it over to Barrow, who proudly carried

the little instrument to London at the end of 1671. It created a

sensation and was soon brought to Whitehall, where an anxious

King Charles II was treated to a demonstration of its powers.

Meanwhile, Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society,

wrote the great Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695)

to inform him of Newton’s success. On receiving word of the re-

flector, Huygens wrote back, describing the new instrument as

nothing less than “the marvelous telescope of Mr. Newton.”9

Oldenburg also wrote Newton a letter of congratulations in

which he informed the secretive professor that he had been nomi-

nated for membership in the Royal Society. Newton gratefully

acknowledged the honor, then dropped a bombshell: “I am [pro-

posing] and considering to be examined an account of a philo-

sophical discovery which induced me to the making of the said

telescope, and which being in my judgment the oddest if not the

most considerable detection which hath hitherto been made in

the operations of nature.”10

Little did anyone in London realize that Newton was referring

to his discovery that white light is composed of the primary col-

ors. Yet once he had so boldly promised to reveal one of nature’s

greatest secrets, he suddenly began having second thoughts. “I

hope,” he wrote in his next letter to a puzzled Oldenburg, “I shall

get some spare hours to send you . . . that account [of light] which

I promised.”11

After wavering, Newton wrote up the major steps in his optical

discoveries that led him to the experimentum crucis, and even in-

cluded an explanation of colors of the rainbow. Water droplets

that refract the most light rays are on the exterior of the rainbow

and appear to be red, while droplets comprising the inner layers


deflect less light and appear as darker colors. He concluded by

requesting that if any of the Fellows were interested enough to

repeat his experiments, “I should be very glad to be informed with

what success.”12

Newton, it seems, need not have worried. Oldenburg placed

his paper on the agenda of the next meeting, where it was read

aloud. The session had no sooner adjourned than the secretary

wrote him to report the result: “[The] reading of your discourse

concerning light and colors was almost their only entertainment

for that time. I can assure you, Sir, that it there met with a singular

attention and uncommon applause.”13 Oldenburg urged Newton

to give him permission to publish the paper in the next issue of

the Philosophical Transactions, which would bring the author last-

ing fame.

Newton’s spirits soared when he received word of the recep-

tion of his work. As to the printing of the paper, he replied to

Oldenburg, “I leave it to their pleasure,” a far cry from his earlier

refusal to allow John Collins to publish the equally revolutionary

De Analysi.14

4 3“ K I N D L I N G C O A L”

Five

“ K I N D L I N G C O A L ”

AS CURATOR OF EXPERIMENTS FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY, ROBERT

Hooke was given the considerable task of confirming Newton’s

findings with prisms. No portrait of Hooke survives, but the diary

writer Samuel Pepys observed that he “is the most and promises

the least of any man in the world I ever saw.”1 Of medium stature,

Hooke suffered from a bent spine; his large head, dominated by

bulging gray eyes, seemed too big for his body. A pale complex-

ion and fixed stare created the impression of one detached and

unaware of his surroundings. Taking pity on his misshapen friend

in print, the biographer John Aubrey felt compelled to add of

Hooke, “He haz a delicate head of haire, browne, and of an excel-

lent moist curle.”2

Despite his looks, Hooke possessed intellectual gifts that bor-

dered on genius and in temperament was cast in a mold reminis-

cent of Leonardo. His thought process, like that of the great


Florentine, was an erratic mixture of sudden uprisings and ago-

nizing downfalls, of crescendo and diminuendo. He raced from

problem to problem, often attacking new ones before resolving

previous questions. Indeed, it is on men like Hooke that fate plays

one of its cruelest jokes, blessing them with great intuition while

denying them the mathematical gifts to transform their visions

into concrete principles. Always painfully conscious of more than

he could prove, Hooke watched in agony while others reaped the

harvest for which he had helped prepare the ground.

Like Achilles and Hector, Newton and Hooke seemed destined

by the gods to do battle. On the day Newton’s reflecting telescope

was first examined by the admiring Fellows of the Royal Society,

a jealous Hooke argued that the invention was of little moment.

Hooke claimed he had fashioned a refracting telescope eight years

earlier that was only an inch long and could be worn on the chain

of his pocket watch. According to its maker, it performed better

than any telescope—even one fifty feet long. Only the onset of the

plague had kept him from constructing a larger version of the in-

strument. He had also wanted to keep his secret from the glass

grinders. At least some of those present must have been skeptical,

for Hooke liked to brag and often claimed that the fear of theft

was the reason for not making his inventions and discoveries

known.

Ever in a hurry, Hooke later admitted that he spent very little

time reading Newton’s paper and duplicating his experiments, a

step essential to confirming the results. Yet he agreed with

Newton’s conclusions, with one major exception. After stating

that he would “not mingle conjectures with certainties,” Newton

had asserted that “it can no longer be disputed whether light be a

body.”3 In other words, experiments had led him to embrace what


was then known as the “corpuscular theory,” which held that a

light beam is composed of minute particles, or corpuscles, whose

“blows” on the surface of objects produce the colors of the spec-

trum. Conversely, Hooke, who leaned toward the theory that light

is composed of waves rather than of tiny particles, took Newton

to task for making an unproven claim: “Nay, even those very ex-

periments which he alleged do seem to me to prove that light is

nothing but a pulse or motion propagated through a . . . uniform

and transparent medium.”4

Angry at having left himself open to criticism, Newton delayed

his reply, vowing never to make the mistake of mixing fact with

conjecture again. Meanwhile, comments began coming in from

other natural philosophers who had read his paper in the Philo-sophical Transactions. Foremost among them was the great Dutch

scientist Christiaan Huygens, who had taken up residence in Paris

after being promised a handsome pension by Jean-Baptiste

Colbert, minister of finance to Louis XIV, the Sun King. Having

earlier praised Newton’s telescope, Huygens pronounced the new

theory of colors “highly ingenious.” Coming from Europe’s great-

est natural philosopher, this was heady praise indeed.

But there were rumblings from other quarters that Newton did

not appreciate. Sir Robert Moray, who served as the first presi-

dent of the Royal Society, proposed four simplistic and essen-

tially worthless experiments as a means of verifying the

experimentum crucis, which Moray lacked the skill to duplicate

himself. Then from France came a long letter written by Ignance

Gaston Pardies, a professor of speech and a member of the So-

ciety of Jesus, a learned order of Roman Catholic priests. Like

Moray, Pardies had failed in several attempts to duplicate the

experimentum crucis and concluded that Newton’s results lacked


scientific merit. A deeply irritated Newton drafted a sharp reply

in which he concluded that “[my results] are difficult to prove,

and which if I did not know to be true, I should prefer to reject

as vain and empty speculation, than acknowledge them as my

hypothesis.”5

A shaken Pardies next wrote to Oldenburg. He included a com-

ment for Newton, but begged the Royal Society secretary to ex-

amine its contents for anything offensive before forwarding it to

Cambridge. Pardies had withdrawn his first argument but raised

another in its place, which again challenged Newton’s skills as an

experimentalist. Newton sent an even more chilling blast across

the English Channel, scolding the Jesuit for his sloppy work and

for “philosophizing” instead of “establishing properties by ex-

periments.” At Newton’s instruction, Pardies took up his prisms

once again and this time reproduced the very results contained in

Newton’s original paper. “The last scruple which I had about the

experimentum crucis,” Pardies wrote Oldenburg, “is fully re-

moved. I now clearly perceive by [Newton’s] figure what I did

not before understand. . . . I have nothing further to desire.”6

Newton had no sooner settled his accounts with Pardies when

Oldenburg began pressing him for a publishable reply to Hooke’s

criticism of the corpuscular theory. Alerted to Newton’s temper,

Oldenburg cautioned Newton to “aim at nothing but the discov-

ery of truth” instead of attacking persons by name.7

It was a warning Newton chose not to heed in his response of

June 11, 1672, in which Hooke is named at least thirty times.

Newton began by expressing disappointment in a person from

whom he had expected an impartial examination of his hypothesis.

Once the knife was inserted, he began twisting the blade: “Mr.

Hooke knows well that it is not for one man to prescribe rules to the


studies of another, especially not understanding the grounds on

which he proceeds.”8 He then went on to show that it did not

matter which mechanical hypothesis one might embrace; whether

corpuscles, waves, or some other, the principle of colors remained

unchanged. Hooke would do well to repeat the experimentumcrucis rather than rely on “hypothetical explications.”

It was a brilliant, if not necessarily fair, exercise in turning the

tables. Instead of asking Newton to redraft his response,

Oldenburg, who disliked the know-it-all Hooke, immediately pre-

sented the reply to the council of the Royal Society. Hooke was

humiliated and suffered additional embarrassment when

Oldenburg published the text in the November issue of the Philo-sophical Transactions. Hooke’s criticism of Newton’s work never

reached print.

Still, Newton must have felt a lot like the Dutch boy who at-

tempted to plug holes in the dike with his fingers; each time one

was sealed another opened up. In the autumn of 1672 Huygens,

his only important ally in the international scientific community,

expressed second thoughts about the conclusions on light in a

letter to Oldenburg. After the letter was passed on to Newton, the

secretary received a stunning reply: “Sir, I desire that you will

procure that I may be put out from being any longer a Fellow of

the Royal Society. For though I honor that body, yet since I see I

shall neither profit them, nor can partake of the advantage of their

assemblies, I desire to withdraw.”9

Oldenburg and John Collins, who was still corresponding with

Newton on mathematics, quickly put their heads together in hopes

of averting disaster. Taking Newton’s resignation for what it was—

a plea for emotional support—Oldenburg not only promised to

waive Newton’s quarterly dues but wrote, “You may be satisfied


that the [Royal Society] in general esteems and loves you, which I

can assure you of.”10 Newton was not completely satisfied, but

when he wrote back two weeks later he dropped the matter of his

resignation. However, he wrote, “I must signify to you that I in-

tend to be no further solicitous about matters of philosophy.”11

Needless to say, Oldenburg forwarded no more letters to him con-

taining objections to the controversial paper.

A curtain of silence descended. For the next two and a half

years Newton scarcely corresponded with anyone. Then, in

September 1674, Francis Hall, or Linus, as he called himself in

Latin, sent a letter to Oldenburg criticizing Newton’s experi-

ments. Oldenburg was hesitant to pass it on, but if he did not do

so his position as an impartial scientific agent would be compro-

mised. The letter was forwarded, and it did not take long to learn

that the Cambridge professor remained as touchy as ever. New-

ton wrote Oldenburg that Linus, an eighty-year-old professor of

Hebrew and mathematics, had gotten it all wrong, just as his fel-

low Jesuit Pardies had. Newton reaffirmed his earlier position that

he was no longer interested in debating the finer points of natural

philosophy, but if Linus was so foolish as to publish the results of

his poorly conducted experiments he would only be “slurring him-

self in print with his wide conjecture.”12

Meanwhile, during a rare visit to London, Newton had been

surprised at the high praise lavished on his work by members of the

Royal Society. Even the deformed Hooke seemed less of a threat

when viewed in person. Indeed, Newton mistakenly thought that

the curator of experiments had abandoned his previous notions

concerning colors and was coming around to his point of view.

Newton, who secretly craved recognition, decided to break his

vow of silence. Near the end of 1674, an elated Oldenburg re-


ceived Newton’s most daring and complex paper to date—“An

Hypothesis Explaining the Properties of Light.” The Fellows were

so impressed that the meetings of December 9 and 16 were al-

most entirely devoted to its contents. Then, following Christmas

recess, its many principles were deliberated during the meetings

of December 30 and January 13, 1675.

The truly great scientific mind distinguishes itself in two ways:

first, in its capacity for original thought; second, in setting forth a

principle by which knowledge, both old and new, is forged into a

grand design. Newton’s work on gravity during the plague years

had involved more than mathematical calculations. He was no less

interested in determining the physical cause of this perplexing

phenomenon, a subject to which he had devoted countless hours

of thought during the intervening years. Having rejected hypo-

thetical speculation on the part of others, he now found himself

in the awkward but exhilarating position of defending a sweeping

hypothesis of his own.

In his paper Newton postulates the existence of ether, a me-

dium or agent by which many forces acting on matter throughout

the universe are generated. Much less dense and more elastic than

air, ether cannot be seen or felt. And while it is to be found every-

where, it is rarer within the dense bodies of the sun, stars, and

planets than in the vast spaces separating them. In his mind’s eye,

Newton saw the Earth and the celestial bodies as giant sponges,

steadily soaking up the stream of invisible matter that constantly

presses down upon their surfaces. This stream, he wrote, “may

bear down with it the bodies it pervades with force proportional

to the surfaces of all their parts it acts upon,” the first known

musings on universal gravitation. Once the ether has penetrated

into the “bowels” of a planet or star it is somehow transformed


and returns to space where the process repeats itself in an endless

cycle: “For nature is a perpetual circulatory worker, generating

fluids out of solids, and solids out of fluids. . . . And as the Earth,

so perhaps may the sun imbibe this spirit to conserve his shining

and keep the planets from receding further from him, and . . . this

spirit affords and carries with it thither the solar fuel and material

principle of light.”13 Newton sought to explain gravity not only in

terms of the ethereal medium but in terms of other equally puz-

zling phenomena. Such phenomena included cohesion, or the

mutual attraction by which the various elements of a body are

held together, and animal sensation, or what we now call feelings

generated in the nervous system. Finally, he filled the paper with

detailed accounts of many experiments designed to reinforce his

soaring hypothesis.

Newton bolstered his theory in a second paper sent to London

along with the first. Titled “Discourse of Observations,” he specu-

lated that when corpuscles of light pass through the ether, the

medium’s varying density alters the speed and direction in which

the corpuscles move. This, in turn, produces the familiar effect of

reflection as well as the scattering phenomenon called diffusion.

Yet colors themselves do not arise from changes in the corpuscles.

Instead, different colors are produced when the particles are sepa-

rated from one another, creating the familiar spectrum.

Newton’s second paper owed much to Hooke’s own treatise

on light, Micrographia (The Drawing of Small Objects), which

contains an account of the colors of thin films such as soap

bubbles. But where Hooke had relied exclusively on observation,

Newton employed meticulous measurements and mathematical

analysis, enabling him to take over ground first broken by the frus-

trated curator of experiments. In an attempt to save the day, Hooke


called for a secret meeting with a few close friends at Joe’s Coffee

House in London, where, he later wrote in his diary, “we began a

new club.” The sole topic of conversation was Newton’s latest

work. After the group met again three weeks later, Hooke noted,

“I showed that Mr. Newton had taken my hypothesis of the pulse

or wave.”14 What was described as Hooke’s gray eye had suddenly

sprung to life.

The problem was not one of theft but Newton’s failure to ac-

knowledge Hooke’s work. He would likely have won Hooke’s

support if only he had praised the credit-starved experimentalist

as a source of fruitful ideas. Instead, Newton liked to think of him-

self as a wholly independent agent, a self-created myth his biogra-

pher Frank Manuel termed “the magic circle of his infallibility.”

As suspicious as Hooke, Newton soon got wind of the secret

meetings from Oldenburg and fired off a letter to London. “As for

Mr. Hooke’s insinuation that the sum of the hypothesis I sent you

had been delivered by him in his Micrographia, I need not be

much concerned. I may avoid the savor of having done anything

unjustifiable or unhandsome towards [him].”15 He again re-

counted the penetrating nature of his insights, which Hooke had

barely glimpsed. To Hooke, Newton had become a fearsome ri-

val; to Newton, Hooke was an intolerable nuisance.

When Oldenburg read some of Newton’s passages criticizing

Hooke at the Royal Society meeting of January 20, 1675, matters

came to a head. The secretary had embarrassed Hooke once too

often. Taking matters into his own hands, Hooke wrote directly

to Newton in Cambridge about what he termed “Oldenburg kin-

dling coal.”“I do no way approve of contention or feuding or prov-

ing in print,” Hooke began, “and shall be very unwillingly drawn

to such kind of war.”16 He then praised Newton’s “Hypothesis


Explaining the Properties of Light,” judging that “you have gone

much farther in that affair than I did.”17 In the future they would

be better off corresponding directly with each other so as to pro-

duce light rather than heat.

Newton’s reply was no less polite. He addressed Hooke as “his

honored friend” whose “generous freedom” in writing “becomes

a true philosophical spirit.”18 There was nothing he wished to

avoid more than contention in print and gladly accepted Hooke’s

offer to correspond privately. In light of future developments, it is

doubtful whether either was sincere. For the moment, however,

the one-time country boys were acting like fawning courtiers—

overpraising each other, bowing, scraping, tipping their plumed

hats in grand gestures.

Four years had passed since Newton first informed the Royal

Society of his experiments with prisms. Yet, difficult as it is to

believe, neither Hooke nor anyone else had attempted to dupli-

cate the results before the distinguished body. Finally, on Thurs-

day, April 27, 1676, “a very clear sun-shine day,” Hooke followed

Newton’s instructions to the letter, and the experimentum cruciswas verified independent of the question of whether light is par-

ticle or wave, or whether ether is the mechanism by which gravity

works. Hooke, who wrote down everything else he witnessed that

day in his diary, including Thomas Tompion’s repair of Lady

Wilkins’s watch and the direction of a drain through cellars, could

not bring himself to record yet another of Newton’s triumphs.

But when word of the results reached Cambridge, Newton could

not hide his pleasure. Surely now, he wrote Oldenburg, “Mr.

Linus’s friends will acquiesce.”19

5 3T H E A L C H E M I S T

Six

T H E A L C H E M I S T

IT WAS AT THE GLOBE THEATRE, THE LONDON PLAYHOUSE CON-

structed in 1598, that most of William Shakespeare’s dramas were

first performed by a company of actors called Chamberlain’s Men.

Among the most memorable scenes played out on the Globe’s

stage was one from the tragedy Macbeth. It is set in a cave, where

three witches circle a boiling cauldron, chanting:

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

Fillet of a fenny snake,

In the cauldron boil and bake;

Eye of newt and toe of frog,

Wool of bat and tongue of dog.

To an audience of Shakespeare’s time, there was nothing un-

usual about witches or boiling cauldrons or the casting of spells

over a vile brew of exotic ingredients. But when it later became


known that Isaac Newton, who was born two years before the

Globe burned down in 1644, also kept a cauldron stocked with

odd ingredients, it was considered to be something of a scandal.

After all, how could the greatest of natural philosophers have fallen

victim to the practice of magic—the very superstition modern sci-

entists were seeking to stamp out?

It is almost certain that Newton’s introduction to the fire and

the crucible came during his Grantham years when he lived with

the apothecary William Clarke. Clarke prepared remedies for his

customers in a small laboratory located either in or near his shop.

That Isaac was a close observer is proven by the many recipes

recorded in his early student notebooks, in addition to the vol-

umes he began to collect for his personal library.

By the mid-1660s the philosophical notebook of Newton’s

Cambridge years was crammed with entries drawn from the works

of a new group of experimenters in metals who called themselves

“chymists.” During an autumn visit to London in 1669, Newton

purchased two portable furnaces and enough supplies to conduct

scores of his own experiments. Though he was only in his late

twenties, his long hair was now completely gray, prompting

Wickins to remark that it was the “effect of his deep attention of

mind.” An unusually merry Newton replied that he had experi-

mented so frequently with quicksilver, or mercury, “as from thence

he took the Colour.”1

Newton’s laboratory adjoined his living quarters and could be

seen from bustling Trinity Street a short distance away. By the

1680s he had become so deeply involved in experiments that he

found it necessary to employ an assistant, a shirttail relative named

Humphrey Newton who hailed from Grantham. Humphrey left a

vivid portrait of his employer, whom he described as a man trans-

ported by his work:


So intent, so serious upon his studies that he eat very spar-

ingly, nay ofttimes he has forgot to eat at all. . . . He very rarely

went to Bed till 2 or 3 of the Clock, sometimes not till 5 or 6,

especially at spring & fall of the Leaf, at which Times he used to

imploy about 6 weeks in his Elaboratory, the fire scarcely going

out either Night or Day, he sitting up one Night, as I did another,

till he had finished his Chymicall Experiments, in ye Performance

of which he was the most accurate, strict, exact.2

But what, precisely, was Newton after? Of that, Humphrey had

no inkling:

What his Aim might be, I was not able to penetrate into, but

his Pains, his Diligence at those set Times made me think he

aimed at something beyond the Reach of human Art & Industry.

I cannot say I ever saw him drink, either Wine, Ale or Beer, ex-

cepting Meals, & then but very sparingly.3

Newton, it seems, had succumbed to the ancient call described

by one Ruland the Lexicographer: “The Alchemical meditatio is

an inner dialogue with someone who is invisible, as also with god,

or with oneself, or with one’s good angel.”

The truth is that Newton was neither a grand magician nor a

modern chemist, but something in between. For many centuries

learned men the world over had been seeking to solve a riddle as

ancient as the pyramids. Calling themselves “alchemists,” a word

coined by the Arabs centuries earlier to describe those who worked

with chemicals, they risked everything, including money, health,

and the welfare of their families, in quest of the so-called

philosopher’s stone. The “stone,” which was also called the “grand

elixir,” the “grand magistery,” and many other names, was not a


solid substance but the rarest of liquids possessed of legendary

powers. When mixed with common metals, such as lead, it could

transform them into the most precious substances—namely, sil-

ver and gold. If drunk on a regular basis, the stone promised im-

mortality, such as that sought in the mythical Fountain of Youth

by the sixteenth-century Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León.

Medieval alchemists couched their laboratory notes in cryptic

symbols to protect their secrets from the prying eyes of rivals. Many

gained the support of wealthy patrons who dreamed of great riches

once the secret of transformation became known.

Strange as it may seem, Isaac Newton was perhaps the greatest

alchemist of all. At his death he left hundreds upon hundreds of

handwritten pages on alchemy, in addition to a remarkable docu-

ment titled Index Chemicus (The Chemical Index). The “Index”

contains 879 headings, with at least 5,000 references to informa-

tion found in scores of other alchemical texts. In addition to his

countless experiments, Newton read everything alchemical that

he could buy, beg, or borrow, fearing that the smallest overlooked

clue might conceal the key to the universal matter that would ex-

plain the very structure of the world. Dr. Thomas Pellet, a re-

spected member of the Royal Society chosen to decide which of

Newton’s papers to publish after his death, was so horrified by

the venture into alchemy that he wrote in bold letters across the

wrappers: “Not fit to be printed.”4

A closer examination of the alchemical papers by modern schol-

ars has led to some startling, and rather more reassuring, conclu-

sions. It is now clear that Newton was not primarily interested in

getting rich or in prolonging his life, though he sincerely believed

that such things were possible. Instead, he had to know every-

thing there is to know about the behavior of matter, from the small-


est particle to the grandest star. Before 1666 he had focused on

what scientists now refer to as the macrocosm, or the cosmos it-

self. After 1666 his interests broadened to include the microcosm,

the smallest worlds of invisible matter through which all things in

nature are formed, grow, decay, and eventually return to their ba-

sic elements. By studying these worlds, Newton believed that he

could discover what light truly is, how forces such as gravity and

magnetism act across great distances, and how the theoretical ether

of his experiments triggers changes in the bodies it inhabits.

In one sense Newton was preoccupied by the very ideas that

fuel current scientific debates. Black holes, formed by collapsed

stars at the centers of galaxies, are fascinating partly because their

explanation promises to aid in unifying the large and the small.

The two major theories of twentieth-century physics are relativ-

ity, which applies to light as it streaks across the great expanses of

trackless space, and quantum mechanics, which seeks to compre-

hend invisible worlds of micromatter. The great problem is to forge

a principle that combines both realms—the vast and the infini-

tesimal. Newton was the first to attempt it; Einstein was the sec-

ond. Neither was successful and both men, despite their marvelous

achievements, went to their graves disappointed at failing to do

so. “Something beyond the reach of human Art & Industry,” as

Humphrey Newton had written.

Yet, in another sense Isaac Newton was less of a modern thinker

than many would like to admit. Alchemy was not yet the science

of chemistry, nor would it become so until the emergence of a

brilliant generation of eighteenth-century experimenters. Their

company included Joseph Priestley, Henry Cavendish, and,

most important, the Frenchman Antoine Lavoisier, who distin-

guished chemical elements from the compounds long employed


by alchemists. Moreover, Newton’s alchemy was as deeply rooted

in the past as in the present.

As an avid reader of old texts, Newton believed in a concept

called the prisca sapientia, or wisdom of the ancients, a doctrine

popular among certain scholars during the Renaissance. This

doctrine held that the great truths of nature had been known to

some of the most brilliant and morally upright thinkers of the dis-

tant past. Such thinkers included the Greek philosophers Plato

and Democritus, the medieval scholars Albertus Magnus, Arnold

of Villanova, and Roger Bacon, as well as some of the most im-

portant figures from the Bible—King Solomon, the prophet Isaiah,

and Jesus of Nazareth. Not surprisingly, these men had hidden

their knowledge of how nature works in symbolic language that,

like a complex code, was extremely difficult to decipher. Newton

took special note of a passage from the Book of Isaiah in which

the ancient Hebrew promises enlightenment to the true believer:

“And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches

of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the Lord, which

call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.”5 In one of his many

manuscripts, Newton echoes the prophet’s words by arguing that

wisdom and insight are “not only to be found in the volume of

nature but also in the sacred scriptures, as in Genesis, Job, Psalms,

Isaiah & others. In the knowledge of this Philosophy God made

Solomon the greatest philosopher in the world.”6 Little wonder

that Newton drew up detailed plans of the great temple Solomon

constructed in Jerusalem in hopes of finding clues to the secrets

of nature in its design.

There is no doubt that Newton considered himself specially

chosen to rediscover and expand the ancient wisdom, thus be-

coming one of the few from each generation so blessed. After all,


he was born on Christmas Day and had survived his premature

entry into the world when everyone, except perhaps his mother,

thought he would die within hours of his birth. He rose to the

highest place at Grantham’s King’s School and then, during the

“miraculous year,” unraveled the secret of light, gave birth to a

revolutionary mathematics, and undertook calculations that would

soon elevate his musings on gravity to the realm of scientific truth.

After a careful reading of the Bible, Newton was able to reconstruct this

plan of the temple built by King Solomon in Jerusalem. Burndy Library,Cambridge, Massachusetts


Who else among his generation had accomplished so much, and

at such an early age? And why should his pursuit of alchemy not

reveal even more secrets about the behavior of matter and its ef-

fect on everything from atoms to the stars?

Besides containing invaluable keys for unlocking what New-

ton termed nature’s “operations,” Scripture to him served as both

a moral guide and a means of determining what would happen in

the future. The earliest clues to his private thoughts on God are

contained in the confession of sins he penned at Cambridge when

he was nineteen: “Not turning nearer to Thee for my affections.

Not living according to my belief. Not loving Thee for Thy self.”7

From these simple sentences he would go on to write an estimated

1,400,000 words on religion, more than the alchemy, more than

the mathematics, more even than the physics and astronomy that

made him immortal.

Newton came to know the Old and the New Testaments better

than most clergymen. And, as with everything else he studied, his

interpretation of Scripture differed radically from that of others.

Unlike Wickins and his fellow scholars at Trinity College, New-

ton was not ordained into the ministry of the Church of England.

With Isaac Barrow’s assistance, he successfully petitioned King

Charles II to set aside the legal requirement that he take the oath

of ordination upon graduating.

By the 1670s Newton had become convinced that a major prin-

ciple embraced by the church was wrong. The doctrine of the

Trinity, to which his very college had been dedicated by Henry

VIII, was in his eyes a form of heresy. Newton rejected this idea

on the grounds that the worship of three figures in one violates

the First Commandment, which states that there shall be only one

God, the Creator of the universe. To accept ordination, or Holy


Orders, would be to sacrifice his conscience, something he would

not do.

Yet, at the same time, Newton was being less than honest when

he petitioned the king, for he kept his real reason for not taking

Holy Orders secret. Why he chose to lie is easily understood: if

his rejection of church doctrine was ever discovered, he would be

dismissed from Trinity College and forced to return home to

Woolsthorpe in disgrace, his chances of ever making a name for

himself ruined. Instead, he kept his explosive opinions to himself,

and only on occasion revealed them to an inner circle of young

admirers once he became a famous man.

Employing sacred texts, Newton compiled a dictionary of reli-

gious terms, events, and images in a manner reminiscent of the

Index Chemicus. He believed that biblical prophecy, especially as

set forth in the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament and the Rev-

elation of St. John in the New, provided an excellent chronology

of events to come. Of course, the writings required interpretation

and once again Newton thought he was just the person for the

job: “Having searched after knowledge in the prophetique scrip-

tures,” he wrote while he was still in his thirties, “I have thought

myself bound to communicate it for the benefit of others.”8 Such

communication would not take place until after his death, how-

ever, when his Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, andthe Apocalypse of St. John was published in 1733. In this work he

predicted that Satan’s spell would be broken and that the “fear-

ful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and

sorcerers, and idolators, and all liars shall have their part in the

lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.”9 And just exactly

when would this come to pass? Never shrinking from a challenge,

Newton calculated that it would occur in the year 2060.


It is easy to dismiss Newton’s religious beliefs as little more

than the eccentric musings of an otherwise supremely rational

mind. But it must be remembered that however modern his sci-

ence may seem to us, Newton was still a man from the seventeenth

century, a man of his time. Unlike many thinkers today, he saw no

conflict between science and religion and wrote that the world

could not operate without God being present. Indeed, without

the Creator’s periodic intervention the universe would eventually

run down, only to collapse and explode as the planets, comets,

and stars rush together as part of the final cataclysm long fore-

told in prophecy. Few things would have angered or dismayed

Isaac Newton more than the claim by a later generation of think-

ers that his formulation of mechanical laws established the frame-

work of a universe in which God is no longer a vital, or even

necessary, part.

6 3“ A B O O K N O B O D Y U N D E R S T A N D S ”

Seven

“A B O O K N O B O D Y

U N D E R S T A N D S ”

IN AUGUST 1684 A HANDSOME YOUNG ASTRONOMER NAMED EDMOND

Halley boarded the London coach for Cambridge and sat back to

ponder the events that had sent him on an important mission.

Earlier in the year, he had entered into a lively conversation with

Robert Hooke and Sir Christopher Wren, noted architect of the

new St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Halley suggested that the

force of attraction between the planets and the sun decreases in in-

verse proportion to the square of the distance between them. If this

were true, then each planet’s orbit should take the form of Kepler’s

ellipse, a shape like a football, though somewhat more rounded.

Halley recalled that Hooke immediately “affirmed that upon

that principle all the Laws of the celestial motions were to be dem-

onstrated.”1 Wren, who was also deeply interested in the new sci-

ence, claimed that he, too, had reached the same conclusion. The

problem, as all three admitted, was to find the mathematical means

of proving it.


Anxious for a solution, Sir Christopher offered to give a valu-

able book to the friend who could deliver solid proof within the

next two months. Hooke, to whom modesty was a stranger,

claimed that he already possessed the required proof. However,

he would keep it a secret for the time being so that his friends

“might know how to value it, when he should make it public.”2

The deadline came and went without a word from Hooke, and

spring soon turned to summer. Finally, after seven months of si-

lence, Halley decided to act. He cast an anxious eye in the direc-

tion of Cambridge and made a fateful decision. He would visit

Trinity College to see if the secretive Isaac Newton could shed

some light on the matter.

Newton was living an even more isolated existence than be-

fore. Some years earlier his mother, Hannah, had caught what was

described as a “malignant fever,” a catchall term for any number

of fatal illnesses. Newton hurried to Woolsthorpe and took charge

of Hannah’s care, dressing her blisters and sitting up all night at

her bedside. Unfortunately, she was beyond saving and died some

days later. As her first child, Isaac inherited most of her property,

making him an independently wealthy man.

A more recent blow was the departure from Cambridge of John

Wickins, Newton’s roommate of twenty years. Wickins became

minister of the parish church at Stoke Edith, married, and fathered

a son named Nicholas. Though they had been through much to-

gether, the two friends would never meet again and exchanged no

more than a letter or two in the coming years.

Newton’s prescription for loneliness was work, work, and more

work. Humphrey Newton observed: “I never saw him take any

Recreation or Pastime, either in Riding out to take the Air, Walk-

ing, Bowling, or any other Exercise whatever, Thinking all Hours


lost that was not spent in his Studies, to which he kept so close

that he seldom left his Chamber.”3 The reclusive professor had

even more time to himself because Cambridge students were little

interested in natural philosophy. Humphrey noted that his em-

ployer often lectured to the classroom walls. Finally, he stopped

going to the lecture hall altogether, placing his texts on deposit in

the college library as was required by statute.

Over the years, Newton became the very model of the absent-

minded professor. He ate little and often had to be reminded by

Humphrey that the dinner delivered to his room had gone un-

touched. He would express surprise, walk over to the table, and

eat a bite or two standing up. “I cannot say,” Humphrey noted, “I

ever saw Him sit at [the] Table by himself.”4

Newton rarely went to bed until two or three in the morning

and often slept in his clothes. He rose at five or six, fully refreshed.

His long, silver hair was seldom combed, his stockings hung loose,

and his shoes were down at the heels. On those rare occasions

when he went out, it was usually to take a meal in the dining hall,

overlooked by the giant portrait of Henry VIII.

But, according to Humphrey, things did not always go as they

should have. Instead of heading almost straight across the Great

Court, Newton sometimes made a left turn, only to wind up on

Trinity Street. On realizing his mistake, he would turn back, and

then “sometimes without going into the Hall return to his Cham-

ber again.”5

In good weather Newton was occasionally seen taking a stroll

in his garden. Picking up a stick, he drew figures on the graveled

walks, which the other Fellows sidestepped for fear of ruining a

work of genius—or folly. According to Humphrey, “When he has

some Times taken a turn or two he has made a sudden stand,


turn’d himself about, run up the Stairs like another Archimedes,

and with a eureka fallen to write on his Desk standing, without

giving himself the Leisure to draw a chair to sit down on.”6 So

absorbed was Newton that he lost track of time and place. The

days and dates on many of the papers recording his experiments

do not match those of the calendar.

As he stepped down from his coach on reaching Cambridge,

Halley hardly knew what to expect. He had exchanged no letters

with Newton and had met him only once before, in London. Fur-

thermore, Hooke’s name was bound to come up. Despite their

mutual pledge not to kindle any more coal, Newton and Hooke

were still feuding over scientific matters both great and small.

To Halley’s surprise, and great relief, Newton was flattered by

his visit. They talked of many things before the astronomer re-

vealed his reason for seeking Newton out. What kind of curve,

Halley finally asked, “would be described by the planets suppos-

ing the force of attraction towards the sun to be reciprocal to the

square of their distance from it?”7

Without hesitation, Newton responded that it would be an el-

lipse! Taken aback, Halley asked him how he knew it.

“I have calculated it,” Newton replied.8

When Halley asked to see the calculations, Newton began rum-

maging through his many stacks of papers while his excited visi-

tor held his breath. As luck would have it, he was unable to find

the critical documents, forcing Halley to depart without the writ-

ten proof he required. However, all was not lost. Before they

parted company, Newton promised to redo his calculations and

send them on to Halley by the London post.

Once again Halley’s patience was sorely tested. Three months

passed without a single word from Cambridge. What Halley did


not know was that Newton had solved the problem of the ellipti-

cal orbit by employing a different mathematical method than

before, but he was not satisfied. He spent much of those three

months working on a nine-page manuscript titled De MotuCorporum in Gyrum (On the Motion of Revolving Bodies). Fi-

nally, in November 1684, nearly eleven months after Halley, Hooke,

and Wren had taken part in the discussion that had started the

quest, a copy of De Motu arrived at Halley’s doorstep in London.

Halley was astounded, for in his hands were the mathematical

seeds of a general science of dynamics—the study of the relation-

ship between motion and the forces that affect it. Not wasting a

moment, he headed north to Cambridge a second time. He must

find out whether Newton would agree to have his paper set before

the Royal Society and published for all the scientific world to see.

On December 10, Halley rose to address his fellow members

of the Royal Society and its new president, Samuel Pepys. He gave

an account of his most recent visit with Newton and of a “curious

treatise,” De Motu. Halley’s report was duly recorded in the min-

utes, and he was urged to push Newton to publish his little work

as soon as possible.

At first Newton may have thought of De Motu as an end in it-

self. But once his creative powers were loosed, there was no check-

ing their momentum. “Now that I am upon this subject,” he wrote

Halley in January 1685, “I would gladly know the bottom of it

before I publish my papers.”9 In his mind’s eye De Motu would

serve as the germ of his masterpiece, the greatest book of science

ever written.

Thus began eighteen months of the most intense labor in the

history of science. In April 1686 Newton presented and dedicated

to the Royal Society the first third of his illustrious work. He titled


it Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical

Principles of Natural Philosophy), commonly known as the Prin-cipia. A month later the Fellows agreed that the society should

pay the cost of the book’s publication, but that decision was re-

versed two weeks later when it was reported that the treasury was

empty for having funded a slow-selling history of fishes. The mem-

bers turned to Halley, who agreed to finance publication out of

his own pocket and to act as the difficult Newton’s editor.

It was a fortunate choice. No sooner had Newton presented his

first installment than Robert Hooke raised his all-too-familiar cry

of theft. He claimed to have formulated the inverse square law six

years earlier, which he had communicated in a letter to Newton.

While it is true that Hooke had corrected a rare blunder Newton

made regarding the path of a falling body, this was a far stretch

from proving that the greater the distance between a planet and

the sun the less intense the gravitational attraction between them.

In addressing Hooke’s claim that Newton had stolen from him,

the eighteenth-century French scientist Alexis Claude Clairaut

later observed, “what a distance there is between a truth that is

glimpsed and a truth that is demonstrated.”10

Newton was predictably outraged when word of Hooke’s

charge reached him in Cambridge. He immediately dashed off an

angry letter to Halley in which he threatened to withhold the rest

of the Principia. “Philosophy is such an impertinently litigous

Lady,” he wrote, “that a man had as good be engaged in lawsuits,

as have to do with her. I found it so formerly, and now I am no

sooner come near to her again, but she gives me warning.”11

Tall, dark-eyed, soft of face and manner, Halley was a presence

pleasing to almost everyone. Despite many frustrations, his treat-

ment of Newton was unwavering, ever polite and respectful from


their first meeting to their last letter, a relationship destined to

endure forty more years. He moved swiftly to calm the troubled

waters. All Hooke desired, Halley wrote Newton, was to be men-

tioned in the preface of the Principia. It would be a fine gesture

on Newton’s part, and one that would cost him nothing. A still

infuriated Newton reacted by going over his manuscript and cross-

ing out every reference to Hooke. With that the storm passed and

Newton agreed to go ahead with publication.

The Principia was not an easy book to read in Newton’s day,

nor is it now. After it was published, Newton was passed on the

street by a student who is said to have remarked, “There goes the

man that writt a book that neither he nor anybody else under-

stands.”12 The same would be said of Einstein when his papers

on the theory of relativity were published some 250 years later.

The first of the Principia’s three books deals with problems of

motion involving no friction or resistance. Book II is concerned

with the motions of fluids and the effect of friction on the motions

of solid bodies in fluids. Important though these books are, it is

Book III, entitled System of the World, that most concerns us.

According to Newton’s first law, “Every body continues in its

state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is

compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.” As

we have seen, Galileo was actually the first to formulate this prin-

ciple. Taking up where the Italian left off, Newton recast and in-

corporated it into his own system of mechanics, or the behavior

of matter. If no outside force acts on a body, it will continue to

move at a constant speed in the same direction. If left alone, a

planet will orbit the sun eternally.

Yet the planets, as Newton had demonstrated mathematically,

circle the sun, tracing out elliptical orbits. Why is it that they do


not move off into space in a straight line, as would be expected

according to his first law? This is where Newton’s second law

comes into play: “The change of motion [of a body] is propor-

tional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction

of the straight line in which that force is impressed.” Stated in less

rigorous terms, this law tells us that the orbiting planet is pulled

at a right angle toward the sun. Its natural tendency to move out-

ward into space, or what Christiaan Huygens called its “centrifu-

gal” force, is perfectly balanced by the sun’s inward pull, or what

Newton termed “centripetal” force. One of the best ways to illus-

trate this principle is to whirl an object on a rope or a string over

one’s head. The object can be likened to a planet, the anchoring

hand to the sun, while the string acts as the “force” that keeps the

object from flying off into the blue.

But what of the string itself ? No such visible tether binds a

planet to the sun. Enter Newton’s third law, which was uniquely

his own: “To every action there is always opposed an equal reac-

tion: or, the mutual action of two bodies upon each other are al-

ways equal, and directed to contrary parts.” Hence, if one body

acts upon another at a distance, the second also acts on the first

with an equal and opposite force. The moon pulls the Earth with

the same force with which the Earth pulls the moon. This is no

less true of the Earth and an apple, except that in this instance the

force exerted causes the apple to visibly change its position, while

the Earth, because of its far greater size, seems totally unaffected.

With these three laws of motion, Newton founded the branch of

modern physics we call dynamics.

The genius of Newton’s achievement becomes even clearer

when we focus on the third law. Gravity acting at a distance could

no longer be thought of as something peculiar to the sun and the


planets; it applies to every object in existence, no matter how large

or how small. As a universal property of all bodies, its force is

dependent solely on the amount of matter each body contains.

Or, as Newton announced in Proposition VII of Book III: “Every

particle of matter attracts every other particle with a force propor-

tional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to

the square of the distances between them.” With this elegant prin-

ciple, he had made the universe a “democracy” by treating all

objects as equals. Everything—from the smallest of atoms to the

largest of planets—obeys the same unchanging law, as profound a

thought as has ever crossed a human mind.

Newton was ready now to demonstrate how the law of univer-

sal gravitation accounts for phenomena that had confounded the

greatest minds in history for centuries. Or, in his words, “to admit

no more causes of natural things than are both true and sufficient

to explain their appearances.”13

He focused his attention on Saturn’s orbit of the sun, which he

had attempted to calculate accurately for several years. Had it only

been a matter of determining the mutual attraction of two bodies,

the solution would have been relatively easy. But, as Newton well

knew, the problem is complicated by the fact that Saturn’s move-

ment is influenced by other bodies as well, most notably its

neighboring planet Jupiter. Although the sun, which contains a

thousand times more matter than all the planets put together, is

the solar system’s dominant body, Jupiter is sufficiently large to

produce small changes, or perturbations, in Saturn’s orbit. Thus

while Saturn follows an elliptical path around the sun, it wavers

during the course of its journey, as though buffeted by an ill wind.

Even Newton, armed as he was with the calculus, could not come

up with anything more than a general solution to what is called


“the three-bodied problem,” one of the most difficult in physics.

Indeed, he once remarked that trying to resolve it made his head

ache, which he treated by tying a band of cloth around his head

and twisting it with a stick until the reduced circulation dulled

the pain. His pioneering study of planetary perturbation was re-

fined over the decades until, in 1846, the planet Neptune was dis-

covered by means of its gravitational pull on Uranus, the first such

body to be discovered on the basis of theoretical calculations alone.

No less intriguing to Newton were the marked irregularities in

the moon’s orbit, a phenomenon that had puzzled astronomers

for centuries. While the lunar orbit is dictated by the pull of Earth,

it too is influenced by the enormous mass of the sun. And unlike

the perturbations of the planets, those of the moon are both more

numerous and more pronounced. By employing a complex sys-

tem of calculations, Newton was able to account for most of these

major disturbances. He did the same for Jupiter and its satellites,

which Galileo had discovered in 1609 while gazing through his

homemade telescope.

Among the more interesting deductions found in the Principiais Newton’s assertion that the Earth and the other planets are ob-

late bodies. This means that they are flattened somewhat at their

poles, or axes, and bulge to some degree at their equators. In terms

of Earth, the equatorial bulge means the planet’s surface is a

few miles higher at its central belt than at the North and South

Poles, a seemingly small difference but one fraught with signifi-

cant implications.

Elsewhere in the Principia, Newton had demonstrated that a

perfect sphere attracts another body as if its mass were concen-

trated at its center. However, oblate bodies, such as Earth, do not.


This means that the intensity of the planet’s gravitational field will

not be exactly the same everywhere. The Earth pulls and is in

turn pulled by the moon with a slightly off-center attraction, the

line of pull being strongest at the equatorial bulge, where matter

is most concentrated. In effect we are dealing with a giant top

slightly overloaded on one side. This causes the planet’s axis to

change its angle of rotation very slowly, so as to trace out the shape

of a cone in the heavens. Astronomers call this “the precession of

the equinoxes.” It was first observed by Hipparchus, a Greek as-

tronomer of the late second century B.C., but its explanation de-

fied solution by the best of minds, including a deeply frustrated

Copernicus. Newton undertook the calculation of this conical mo-

tion, which he accurately attributed to the slightly off-center attrac-

tions of the moon. He found that it takes 26,000 years for the Earth’s

axis to complete the cone. Once again genius had triumphed by

explaining a mystifying phenomenon and calculating the time

frame in which it occurs, a far cry from the simple suggestion that

an apple falls to the ground because the Earth attracts it.

Of all the riddles that bedeviled astronomers, none had proved

more baffling than the eternal rise and fall of the seas. Isaac New-

ton ended their frustration with a stroke of his pen: “That the flux

and reflux of the sea arise from the actions of the sun and moon.”14

By applying the law of gravitation to the problem, Newton found

that the power of attraction is greater on the waters facing the at-

tracting body than on the Earth as a whole, and greater on the

Earth as a whole than on the waters on the opposite side. Because

of the moon’s nearness to Earth (240,000 vs. 93,000,000 miles

for the sun), the satellite’s gravitational pull gives rise to the main

tides. Its chief effect is to cause a pair of waves, or ocean humps,


of tremendous area to travel around the Earth once in a lunar day,

or a little less than twenty-five hours. The sun’s attraction pro-

duces a similar but lower pair of waves that circle Earth once in a

solar day of twenty-four hours. The effect of these two pairs of

waves periodically overtaking each other accounts for the spring

and neap tides. The spring tides, the more marked of the two,

occur when the sun, moon, and Earth are in a line and exert maxi-

mum gravitational pull. The weaker neap tides result when the

sun and moon pull at right angles to each other. While Newton’s

calculations were not refined enough to accurately predict the

height of a tide at any given place in the world, another tremen-

dous advance in scientific knowledge was his to claim.

As a young man, Newton had written of staying up all night to

watch comets, and of becoming ill for lack of rest. Until shortly

before his birth, these mysterious visitors had been regarded as

nothing more than vaporous exhalations from Earth released into

the higher regions of the atmosphere. More recently, comets were

thought of as independent celestial bodies, but no one had been

able to account for their seemingly irregular movements across

the midnight sky.

Believing comets to be composed of solid matter, Newton rea-

soned that they must be subject to the same gravitational forces as

the planets. Yet when he employed observational data collected

in part by the astronomer royal, John Flamsteed, with whom he

quarreled almost as violently as he did with Hooke, he found that

the motions of comets were much more complex than those of

the planetary bodies. As a result, he set out to prove that besides

elliptical orbits, celestial bodies could move in paths tracing out

sharper curves than previously imagined. He soon gave substance


to this conjecture by determining that comets “move in some of

the conic sections” about the sun. The natural philosopher then

plotted the curve of the so-called Great Comet of 1681.

Based on what he read in the Principia, Halley was attracted

to cometary theory as well. The gifted astronomer took particular

interest in the orbit of another brilliant comet, which he had closely

observed in 1682. Then, through a painstaking search of past

records worthy of Newton himself, he found that there had been

similar sightings in 1607 and 1531, or about once every seventy-

five years. Could not these sightings, Halley thought to himself,

indicate the periodic return of the same object? He calculated the

orbit on the assumption that it was, and predicted its return in

1758, give or take a year. The streaming body, which now bears

Halley’s name, was next observed on Christmas Day, 1758 (the

116th anniversary of Newton’s birth), by an amateur astronomer

named George Palitsch. Like clockwork, Halley’s comet has since

shown up three more times, reaffirming Newton’s reduction of

yet another great mystery to mathematical rule.

When we step back and look at Newton’s universe from afar,

what is it, exactly, that we see? According to the Principia, we

peer into a seemingly endless void of which only a tiny part is

occupied by material bodies moving through the boundless and

bottomless abyss. Newton’s followers would liken it to a colossal

machine, much like the clocks located on the faces of medieval

buildings. All motions are reduced to mechanical laws, a universe

where human beings and their world of the senses have no effect.

Yet for all its lack of feeling, it is a realm of precise, harmonious,

and rational principles. Mathematical laws bind each particle of

matter to every other particle, barring the gate to disorder and


chaos. By flinging gravity across the void, Isaac Newton united

physics and astronomy in a single science of matter in motion,

fulfilling the dreams of Pythagoras, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo,

and countless others in between. And while Newton was unable

to discover the true cause of gravity itself, a giant riddle still, the

laws he formulated provide convincing proof that we inhabit an

orderly and knowable universe.

7 7“ Y O U R M O S T U N F O R T U N A T E S E R VA N T ”

Eight

“ Y O U R M O S T

U N F O R T U N A T E S E R V A N T ”

THE BOOK THAT SUPPOSEDLY NOBODY COULD UNDERSTAND WAS

finally published in July 1687. Halley, who had put up his own

money to see it through the press, set the price of the leather-

bound volume at nine shillings, a bargain, considering the riches

between its elegant covers. Not satisfied, he offered a second and

cheaper version of the work in hopes that more people would read

the revolutionary treatise. So awed was the astronomer that he

paid its author yet another compliment. He wrote a poem titled

“Ode to Newton” and inserted it at the beginning of the Principia.

Its final line speaks volumes: “Nearer to the gods no mortal may

approach.”

Halley’s sentiments were soon echoed by others. From Scot-

land the noted mathematics professor David Gregory wrote

Newton that “you justly deserve the admiration of the best Ge-

ometers and Naturalists, in this and all succeeding ages.”1 A

stunned French mathematician, the Marquis de l’Hôpital, asked


Sir Godfrey Kneller, the most popular portrait painter of his time,

produced the first portrait of Newton in 1689, when Newton was forty-

six. Courtesy of the Trustees of the Portsmouth Estates


his English friend Dr. John Arbuthnot, “Does Newton eat & drink

and sleep? Is he like other men?”2 Another young teacher of math-

ematics named Abraham de Moivre, who was destined to become

a disciple of Newton, sought to master the Principia by stuffing

his pockets with pages torn from the book, which he read while

traveling from one pupil’s home to another. Some of the highest

praise came from Newton’s small social circle, such as the aging

Dr. Humphrey Babington, a fellow citizen of Lincolnshire and a

Trinity College scholar. After wrestling with the scientific master-

piece for several weeks, Babington remarked that learned men

“might study seven years before they understood anything of it.”3

Despite his hard-earned fame, Newton continued his secretive

ways. His normally fitful correspondence dwindled to less than a

trickle. Only rarely did he emerge from the cocoon of his study to

visit London or his Woolsthorpe property, where his tenants took

advantage of his long absences by allowing the buildings and fences

to fall into ruin. Rents were overdue by as much as three years,

but the landlord was so well off that it little mattered.

Events took a sudden turn on January 15, 1689, when the Cam-

bridge University senate met to elect two delegates to the so-called

Convention Parliament. The previous year King James II, who

hoped to restore Catholicism to England, was forced to flee to

France during a political struggle known as the Glorious Revolu-

tion. Respected for his anti-Catholic views as well as his intellect,

Newton gained a seat in the new Parliament. A week later he was

in London, where he took his place in the House of Commons at

daybreak.

Sensing the historic importance of the moment, Newton ar-

ranged to have his portrait done by Godfrey Kneller, the princi-

pal painter of the day. At age forty-six the subject is at the height


of his mental powers and on the threshold of international fame.

His silver hair is thick and flowing, the myopic eyes somewhat

protuberant but piercing, the angular chin deeply cleft, the mouth

sensuous and delicately formed. The long, slender fingers of

Newton’s right hand, which are visible from beneath his academic

gown, seem more like those of a performer of music than the cho-

reographer of matter’s deterministic dance. Kneller’s midlife por-

trait is a foreshadowing of that famous Jovian look borne by the

aged Newton, who shared with Einstein the aspect of one present

at the Creation.

Newton voted with the parliamentary majority in declaring the

English throne vacant. Within days Prince William of Orange, a

province of the Netherlands, was crowned King William III of

England. William’s wife, Mary, the Protestant daughter of the ex-

iled James II, was crowned queen. The monarchs paraded through

the streets of London to the cheers of the multitude, while New-

ton and his fellow members of Parliament marched respectfully

behind. In the weeks that followed, Parliament laid the basis of a

constitutional monarchy, limiting the power of the throne and

granting religious freedom to all Christians, except Catholics and

those who opposed the doctrine of the Trinity, a matter on which

Newton wisely remained silent. Most important, Parliament en-

acted the Bill of Rights, which would become a model for the

first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. Among

its provisions was the right of Englishmen to petition their gov-

ernment for a redress of grievances, freedom from excessive fines

and bail, a prohibition against cruel punishments, and the guar-

antee that taxes could be raised only with the consent of Parlia-

ment. The long-standing belief that the king was chosen by God

and thus responsible to God alone had been dealt a deathblow.


Having personally reduced the motion of matter to a single uni-

versal law, Newton participated in the most important session of

Parliament in English history. The branches of government, like

the planets, were being balanced for the first time. Still the records

of these deliberations contain not a single reference to him. Accord-

ing to a frequently repeated story, he spoke but once, and that was

to ask an usher to close a window because of a chilling draft.

Yet the year Newton passed in London had seen a marked

change in the man. He spent time in the company of his fellow

natural philosophers at the Royal Society and made a number of

influential friends. Among these was the political philosopher

John Locke, whose writings on constitutional government had

won him the reputation as a champion of liberty. The parliamen-

tary leader Charles Montague, better known as Lord Halifax,

also befriended Newton, as did the visiting Dutch astronomer

Christiaan Huygens, who apparently bore no grudge over the

harsh criticism Newton leveled at him in 1673 for disagreeing

with his theory of light.

Indeed, Newton and Huygens became involved in a minor

scheme to further Newton’s interests. The provost of King’s Col-

lege at Cambridge was dying, and Newton’s friends persuaded

him to apply for the post. Accompanied by Huygens, he met with

the new king to present his case. The royal audience went well,

and it appeared that Newton would be awarded the position, never

again having to speak into a dim and empty lecture hall. Then it

was discovered that the incoming provost of King’s must have

taken Holy Orders and be a fellow of the college. Because Newton

met neither of these qualifications, he was denied the position.

He returned to Trinity College in February 1690 a disappointed

man, but one with high connections and a new appreciation for

the world beyond his quiet university town.


A brisk correspondence between Newton and Locke was

launched in the months that followed and continued until the

latter’s death in 1704. Proof that Newton had his eye on another

position is contained in his query to Locke regarding the Earl of

Monmouth, an influential supporter of the new government and

king. Locke had asked Monmouth’s assistance in finding his friend

a public post, or preferment, as it was commonly known. Unfor-

tunately for Newton, the political winds had shifted in London

and nothing could be done, at least for the moment. A second

scheme involved Locke’s intimate friends Sir Francis and Lady

Masham. Newton and Locke visited Oates, the Mashams’ estate

in Essex, to set forth Newton’s case to become comptroller of the

mint. This strategy also came to nothing, leaving Newton embar-

rassed and bitter.

Newton and Locke had been joined at Essex by a third person,

the young Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. New-

ton had met Fatio in London, and their friendship soon developed

into the most emotional attachment of Newton’s adult life. Fatio

was no less taken by the author of the Principia. Whereas Halley

had likened Newton to the gods, Fatio believed him to be one.

If one is to judge by his only portrait, Fatio was far from a hand-

some man. His face is dominated by a great Roman nose, made

even more prominent by a high, sweeping forehead, small mouth,

and rather sharply pointed chin. Only his eyes are compelling:

keen and intelligent, they seem capable of transfixing anyone.

Fatio wrote his old philosophy teacher back in Geneva that

Newton was both the greatest mathematician ever to have lived,

as well as the most worthy gentleman. He hoped to become a citi-

zen of England and reside with the natural philosopher from


whom he could learn “pure truth.” If only he had the money he

would erect a monument to his friend, a testament to future genera-

tions that at least one Newton admirer recognized his true worth.

Newton and Fatio met several times during the next few years.

A typical visit had Newton taking the coach to London, his math-

ematical and religious papers in hand, where an anxious Fatio

awaited his arrival at a comfortable inn. Newton gave his young

friend access to his most private writings, including those which,

if published, would have seen him declared a heretic. Such trust

was rare for Newton. The only others to gain access to his inner-

most thoughts were Locke and a small number of young disciples,

such as the Cambridge mathematician William Whiston.

Before long Fatio began to regard Newton as his private pos-

session. He tested the bond between them by faking illness and

then asking special favors of his friend, which an anguished New-

ton willingly granted. Worse yet, Fatio confused Newton’s genius

with his own mental skills. He would later claim, much to the

amusement of anyone who would listen, that he had found the

cause of gravity and that Newton had confirmed it. This was non-

sense pure and simple, and it may have contributed to the even-

tual severing of the friendship.

It was against this emotionally charged background that New-

ton decided to have one last try at alchemy. In the spring and sum-

mer of 1693 he completed five chapters of a manuscript on the

multiplication of metals. For a brief while the secret of the ages

seemed within his grasp. He watched transfixed as gold mixed

with a special mercury swelled on being exposed to fire. But he

soon discovered that something was wrong. The amount of gold

supposedly feeding off the mercury had not increased one bit.


Newton crossed out several passages of his projected treatise and

tried again. And again he failed. Finally, after working at the

ragged edge for months, the work was abandoned forever.

In September 1693 Samuel Pepys, who had served as presi-

dent of the Royal Society while Halley was seeing the Principiathrough the press, received a distressing letter. “I am extremely

troubled at the embroilment I am in,” Newton wrote, “and have

neither ate nor slept well this twelve month, nor have my former

consistency of mind. I never designed to get anything by your

interest, nor by King James’s favor, but am now sensible that I

must withdraw from your acquaintance, and see neither you nor

the rest of my friends any more.”4

Pepys was not only deeply shaken but innocent of Newton’s

accusations. By this time James II had been in exile for years and

Pepys wielded no influence at the court of William III. Three days

later, John Locke received an even more disturbing and vengeful

letter from his Cambridge friend. Newton accused him of attempt-

ing to “embroil me with women.” When he had been informed

that Locke was ill, Newton replied, “twere better if you were dead.”

He had also taken Locke for an “atheist” and charged him, as he

had Pepys, with unscrupulous dealings in his attempt to gain pre-

ferment. Newton signed himself “your most humble & most un-

fortunate Servant.”5

The only good thing about the letter was its conclusion, in

which Newton begged his friend’s forgiveness. A deeply con-

cerned Locke wrote back immediately: “Give me leave to assure

you that I am more ready to forgive you than you can be to desire

it.”6 Newton, who by now was feeling much better, attempted to

explain himself in a second letter. The previous winter he had

gotten into an “ill habit” of sleeping by the fire. His health suf-


fered and he then caught “a distemper which this summer has

been epidemical [and] put me further out of order.” When he first

wrote Locke he “had not slept an hour a night for a fortnight to-

gether and for 5 nights together not a wink.”7

Just to be certain that Newton was his old self again, Pepys and

Locke asked their mutual friend John Millington, a Fellow of

Cambridge’s Magdalene College, to pay a call on Newton. Milling-

ton was happy to report that Newton seemed normal, if a bit de-

pressed. During this visit, Newton confessed to writing Pepys “a

very odd letter” for which he was “very much ashamed.” As in his

recent letter to Locke, he blamed his temporary derangement on

a prolonged lack of sleep and a bout of distemper, a general term

then used to describe many kinds of illnesses.

Few scholars have taken Newton at his word, and various theo-

ries have been advanced to explain this dark passage. In fact, New-

ton had been through what may have been a similar, though less

severe, episode many years before. As a student, he had stayed up

all night watching comets and became ill for lack of sleep.

But that is hardly the whole story. One theory holds that New-

ton took leave of his senses because many of his irreplaceable pa-

pers were destroyed in a fire. The supposed culprit was his pet

dog named Diamond, who overturned a candle in Newton’s cham-

bers, causing his anguished master to exclaim, “O Diamond! Dia-

mond! thou little knowest the mischief done!”8 The problem is

that Newton never owned a dog at Cambridge, or for that matter

a cat. And had there been a destructive fire, word of it would have

almost surely gotten around.

A more plausible explanation is the much discussed theory

of poisoning by lead and mercury, two metals commonly found

in Newton’s crucibles. The trembling Mad Hatter of Alice in


Wonderland fame was a victim of lead poisoning, as were his fel-

low hatmakers who used considerable amounts of the metal in

their trade. Besides uncontrollable tremors, regular exposure to

lead and mercury causes loosening of the teeth, darkening of the

nails, weight loss, jaundice, sluggishness, and early aging. As it

happened, Newton displayed none of these telltale symptoms. His

handwriting from the period is as steady as a rock; though he lived

to be eighty-four, he lost only a single permanent tooth; he loved

sweets and gained weight as he got older; and he aged more slowly

than many of his friends. Most important of all, once heavy metals

enter the body they remain for the rest of the victim’s life. Though

Newton breathed in copious amounts of them, his constitution

was strong enough to withstand their presence without showing

any symptoms. Otherwise, he would have taken ill again and again,

becoming increasingly debilitated with time.

It is more than likely that Newton’s illness resulted from a com-

bination of several factors, both physical and mental. Humphrey

Newton vividly described how his employer scarcely slept while

undertaking alchemical experiments. In 1693 Newton was work-

ing at a fever pitch. Moreover, after some initial success, his ex-

periments were yielding nothing but frustration. To one who had

already unlocked many of nature’s greatest secrets, this was both

a depressing and fearsome thought—an Isaac Newton who had

reached the limit of his powers.

Moreover, Newton, as he informed Locke, had been ailing on

and off for a year. It seems more than a coincidence that his friend

Fatio also claimed to be ill during this same period. Then, for

some unknown reason, Newton suddenly broke off their friend-

ship and would have little to do with the man for as long as he


lived. This, too, occurred about the time he wrote his pathetic

letters to Pepys and Locke. Thus Newton’s mind was still intact,

but his spirit was no longer willing. He who had attempted to rise

above human art and industry now longed to leave his beloved

Cambridge, the sooner the better.


Nine

M A R K O F T H E L I O N

IN SEPTEMBER 1695 ISAAC NEWTON SUDDENLY DISAPPEARED FROM

Cambridge without explanation. He returned two weeks later but

told no one where he had been. Rumors began to circulate that he

secretly had gone to London, and finally secured the government

post that his friend John Locke had been unable to deliver. These

rumors were given substance in late November when the math-

ematician John Wallis wrote Edmond Halley from Oxford: “We

are told here Newton is made Master of the Mint: which, if so, I

do congratulate him.”1 Halley, who had kept in touch with New-

ton, was aware that negotiations were under way, and that Newton’s

cause was being championed by his ally Charles Montague, a

powerful political figure who had the king’s ear. Halley also knew

that Wallis was somewhat misinformed. Newton was not a candi-

date for the position of master of the mint but rather that of war-

den, or second in command. In March 1696, Montague again

summoned Newton to London. If all went well, the appointment

8 9M A R K O F T H E L I O N

would be his together with the handsome salary of five or six hun-

dred pounds per year. Without even pausing to draft a reply,

Newton boarded the coach for the capital and his long-awaited

audience with King William III.

No account of the meeting survives, doubtless because there

was nothing special about the occasion—except of course to Isaac

Newton, the son of an illiterate yeoman. The warrant confirming

his appointment was drafted two days later. He quickly returned

to Cambridge and set about packing trunks with the accumula-

tion of thirty-five years’ hard labor, including thousands of pages

of manuscripts containing millions of words of correspondence,

mathematics, optics, alchemy, and religious writings. Such was

his haste that he left many personal possessions behind, includ-

ing his furniture and alchemical equipment. These things were

never reclaimed and comprised something of a Newton museum.

His rooms were proudly shown to visitors long after his death with

the boast that every relic was preserved down to the smallest detail.

As a result of the Great Fire of 1666, the London of merry old

England was no more. Upon its ashes had arisen a teeming, over-

crowded city of some 750,000 souls, second in population only

to Paris among Europe’s major urban centers. Stretching from

Tower Hill to the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, the city

grew up along a great boulevard connected by London Bridge,

the only span across the river Thames. This sprawling waterway,

which drains into the North Sea, ebbs and flows with the tides, and

was forever crowded with hundreds of ships and countless smaller

craft, the latter providing a speedier and safer means of transpor-

tation than the teeming city streets. But in late autumn and win-

ter, piercing mists and thick fogs rolled off the river’s foul waters,

mixed with the hovering smoke from countless chimneys, and


filled the streets with a brown, poisonous cloud that drove all but

the foolhardy and desperate indoors.

Much of London’s work was done by a rough-and-tumble

population of fiercely independent cockneys who inhabited the

East End—watermen, porters, dockmen, and day laborers. Above

them was a middle class of shopkeepers and artisans. At the top

of the social order stood the wealthy merchants, bankers, and

political officials, who resided in the best neighborhoods where

squalor and congestion were kept at arm’s length.

Beyond the old city walls first erected by the Romans, who

named their frontier outpost Londinium, dwelt the huge under-

class comprised of the poor, the homeless, and the criminal, hope-

less men and women with whom Newton would soon have reason

to deal on a regular basis. By the tens of thousands they occupied

unsanitary shacks facing dark and dangerous passages choked with

garbage and human waste pitched from glassless windows above.

Here, in the so-called Liberties, violence walked hand in hand

with the crudest of pleasures, while the powers of the lord mayor

and the constables counted for little. Public floggings seldom dis-

couraged illegal conduct, nor did the regular executions, despite

the fact that they drew vast, jostling crowds on “Hanging Day.”

Those condemned to die were borne amid jeering throngs from

Newgate Prison to Tyburn, the place of execution at one corner

of Hyde Park. The wealthy paid handsomely for choice seats on

the wooden galleries surrounding the gallows; the remainder of

the crowd pressed forward in hopes of gaining a clearer view of the

spectacle. Those convicted of state crimes such as treason were

beheaded by John “Jack” Ketch, the infamous executioner of the

day. Death on the gallows was the penalty for forgers, and it fell to


the warden of the mint to supply the evidence needed to convict

those who counterfeited the king’s coin.

The royal mint was located in one of England’s most forbid-

ding and historic structures—the great Tower of London—a mas-

sive limestone fortress situated atop a hill on the north bank of the

Thames. The tower’s soaring walls were guarded by a moat, which

was still flooded in Newton’s day. Once behind this outer line of

defense, the visitor encounters a second tower-ringed wall, but of

even greater height than the first. Inside the second wall are the

soldiers’ barracks, storehouses for powder and arms, and other

buildings dating from the Middle Ages. At the center of it all stands

the keep, or dungeon, known as White Tower. Constructed in the

time of William the Conqueror, who successfully invaded England

in 1066, White Tower once served as the court of Plantagenet

kings born and nurtured within its mighty walls.

Through the centuries, the Tower of London was home to

England’s most famous prisoners. The future Queen Elizabeth I,

daughter of Henry VIII, had entered through Traitor’s Gate while

still a princess and wept against the tower’s stone walls before

regaining her freedom. Certain of her father’s luckless wives and

political servants had suffered far worse. Ann Boleyn, Catherine

Howard, Thomas Cromwell, and Sir Thomas More all breathed

their last on Tower Green after enduring miserable confinements.

Nor, after she became queen, did Elizabeth herself shrink from

her duty as she saw it. Lord Essex, once among her court favor-

ites, met his God on Tower Green at the hands of the axman, while

the swashbuckling explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, who had supplied

her majesty with captured treasure galore, spent three long im-

prisonments in the tower on her orders.


Like all employees of the mint, Newton took the oath of se-

crecy, pledging not to reveal how new coins were made in hopes

of keeping forgers in the dark. By 1695 counterfeiting had be-

come so widespread that every English coin in circulation was to

be replaced by a freshly minted one. This monumental task re-

quired mint employees to work double shifts and led to the open-

ing of branch mints in other parts of the country. Under the new

warden’s watchful eye, rivers of gold and silver coins began pour-

ing forth from the lumbering stamping machines. And with his

superior Thomas Neale frequently absent, Newton quickly be-

came master of the mint in everything but name.

Still he could not savor his success until he had dealt with a

colorful rogue whose rare but misused gifts nearly proved a match

for his own. William Chaloner was a natural-born swindler and

A coining press in operation. When he began work at the mint, Newton

took an oath of secrecy, vowing not to reveal how new coins were made.

Library of Congress


cunning forger who first made his way in London by fashioning

worthless tin watches, which he hawked in the streets for what-

ever the gullible would pay. He soon formed a partnership with

another rogue, and together they “set up for Piss-Pot Prophets,

or Quack-Doctors,” according to an anonymous pamphlet of the

times.2 Chaloner next bribed a craftsman to teach him the secret

of enameling wood in the Japanese manner. Applying this knowl-

edge to the study of metals, he was soon making counterfeit coins

that easily passed in the marketplace for the real thing.

Meanwhile, Newton had quickly familiarized himself with the

criminal element of London’s vast underworld. His many con-

tacts, any one of whom might have done him in during an un-

guarded moment, included criminals of every stripe—murderers,

thieves, beggars, swindlers, and muggers. He learned of bribes to

destroy evidence, of hideaways in outlying villages, of secret

meetings in taverns and dark attics. He developed contacts with

men and women of many assumed names, hired undercover

agents, and occasionally donned disguises of his own. Those who

refused to cooperate in his investigations were brought before

him in chains for questioning in the tower.

Believing himself to be in the service of a higher morality, New-

ton wanted nothing more than to arrest and convict Chaloner for

his many crimes. But he was no ordinary criminal of the type

Newton had grown used to dealing with. Though he was rich

and rode about London in an elegant carriage with a beautiful

mistress at his side, the master thief was less interested in wealth

and the false respectability it purchased than in the playing of the

game. He loved the fraud he called “funning,” the plotting, the

trickery, the sleight of hand that matched his wits against the tal-

ent and the resources of the government. When confronted with


evidence linking him to a serious crime, he repeatedly wriggled

free by resorting to the big lie, a device he jokingly referred to as

“bubbling.” By the time he crossed swords with the warden of

the mint, Chaloner was nothing short of effervescent.

The forger made no greater mistake than when he boldly ap-

peared before a committee of Parliament to recommend improve-

ments in the minting of new coin. Newton was outraged and let it

be known that Chaloner was his number one target. Chaloner re-

sponded by taunting “that old dogg” Newton, who, in a fit of an-

ger, vowed to hang the villain. It was at this point that Newton

decided to stretch the law in the interest of ridding the world of

his clever tormentor.

Without warning, Chaloner was arrested and clapped in irons

behind the dank walls of Newgate Prison. In return for certain

favors, Newton employed three convicts to gain Chaloner’s con-

fidence and pass on his tales of criminal deeds. The ending, which

had been so slow in coming, lasted only three weeks. Chaloner

was placed on trial for high treason and found guilty, based largely

on the testimony of Newton’s questionable witnesses, all of whom

were confessed criminals. Chaloner’s protests that he had been

framed fell on deaf ears, and the convicted man’s date with the

hangman was set.

Ironically, Chaloner’s only hope of mercy rested with Newton.

Shortly before his scheduled execution, he wrote an emotional

letter to the warden: “I am going to be murdered although per-

haps you may think not but tis true I shall be murdered by the

worst of all murders that is in the face of Justice unless I am res-

cued by your merciful hands.”3 Days later Chaloner got his an-

swer when he was loaded onto a cart and paraded two miles

through the streets to the gallows in Hyde Park. There he repeated


his claim, crying out hysterically to the assembled crowd that he

was being murdered by lies and injustice. Few took notice, for it

was a rare criminal indeed who did not proclaim his innocence

when faced with the moment of death. Newton himself was not

present at the hanging, but the man whom Chaloner had com-

pared to an old dog had the last word. “Criminals, like dogs,” he

remarked, “always return to their vomit.”4

Even as Newton pursued criminals and raised the production

of coins to a record 100,000 pounds per week, his reputation as a

natural philosopher continued to grow. In January 1697 he re-

ceived a letter from Johann Bernoulli, a distinguished mathemat-

ics professor at the University of Basel in Switzerland. The letter

contained two difficult mathematical problems, one of which had

been published in a scientific journal six months earlier but re-

mained unsolved. The other had been solved by the gifted Ger-

man philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von

Leibniz, but Bernoulli had decided to keep Leibniz’s solution a

secret in order to test Newton’s powers.

Newton received Bernoulli’s letter late one afternoon, after a

long and tiring day at the mint, which was in the middle of the

recoinage. The first of the challenge problems required Newton

to determine the curve in which a heavy body falling under the

force of its own weight will descend most rapidly from a given

point to another given point. The second problem was even more

complex and required a series of steps that had so far baffled all

seekers save Leibniz.

Forgetting his dinner, Newton immediately set to work. Some

twelve hours later, at four in the morning, he had the correct an-

swers, yet still refused to go to bed. He drafted a letter to the presi-

dent of the Royal Society and included the solutions, which,


according to his instructions, were to be published anonymously

in the Philosophical Transactions. When the journal came off the

press a few weeks later, mathematicians were stunned. Among

them was Johann Bernoulli, who wrote a friend that only Isaac

Newton could have succeeded where others had failed: “I can tell

the lion by the mark of his claw.”5

Having met and been honored by the king, Newton was the

subject of royal attention from another quarter. In June 1697

Peter the Great, the young czar of all the Russias, left his home-

land on a visit to England and Western Europe. Standing six feet

seven inches, a height that would have made his skeleton the prize

of every scientific society in existence, Peter carried a seal with

the inscription: “I am a pupil and need to be taught.” Everything

involving the new science and technology interested him. Indeed,

the czar planned to take back much of what he learned to his home-

land, which had barely emerged from the Middle Ages. After vis-

iting England’s shipyards, its main cannon factory, and the Royal

Observatory at Greenwich, he specifically requested a meeting

with the author of the Principia. It took place in the Tower of

London, where Newton talked science with the czar and gave him

a tour of the mint, whose great hammer presses, driven by ropes

and human muscle, struck coins on different beats, like giant

cuckoo clocks gone mad.

The czar and his retinue settled in at Sayes Court, which had

been completely redecorated in honor of the Russians’ visit. The

first clue that something was seriously amiss came in the form of a

letter from one of the English servants: “There is a house full of

people, and right nasty.”6 Not until Peter and his court departed

did the full extent of their wildly destructive behavior become

evident. The carpets were so befouled that the floors beneath them


had to be torn up and replaced. The windows in nearly every room

were smashed, causing the occupants to reduce some fifty elegant

chairs to kindling in an effort to stave off the cold. Featherbeds

were shredded “as if by wild animals,” and twenty paintings were

riddled with holes from frequent sessions of indoor target prac-

tice. Neighbors observed the Russians playing a game with wheel-

barrows, an invention unknown back home. They took turns—a

revoltingly dirty Peter included—running one another through

the magnificent four-hundred-foot-long holly hedges, leaving gap-

ing holes in their wake.

Shortly after Peter left England, Newton was visited by Jaques

Cassini, son of the noted astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini.

As an agent of Louis XIV, the famous Sun King who had estab-

lished his French court at Versailles surrounded by orange blos-

soms and a thousand compliant nobles, Cassini offered Newton a

large pension. While Newton would never have said so in public,

his religious views were such that he wanted nothing to do with a

Catholic king of a Catholic kingdom, and so he politely refused

the offer. In return, a rarely snubbed Louis excluded Newton’s

name from his list of nominees to the position of foreign associate

of the French Academy of Science. But one year later, in 1699,

the academy itself made Newton a foreign associate along with

Johann Bernoulli, whose mathematical challenge he had so bril-

liantly met.

Except for an occasional visit to Lincolnshire, Newton’s con-

tacts with his family had been limited since the death of his mother.

At Cambridge he had been content with the slow passage of the

days and seasons, and with the isolation that allowed him to pur-

sue his work undisturbed. Whether he liked it or not, London

and the mint had transformed him into something of a man of


action, requiring him to keep a household where important visi-

tors were entertained over dinner and fine wine.

Never having married, Newton needed someone to look after

his domestic needs and to sit at his table when he had guests.

Rather than rely on a housekeeper, who might lack the required

social graces, he turned to his niece Catherine Barton, the daugh-

ter of his stepsister Hannah. Catherine probably arrived at her

uncle’s house on Jermyn Street in 1696, when she was seventeen.

By all accounts the young woman was strikingly beautiful. When

she came down with smallpox, Newton sent her into the country

to recuperate and worried that her lovely face would be perma-

nently scarred: “Pray let me know,” he wrote, “how your face is

and if your fever be going. Perhaps warm milk from ye Cow may

help to abate it.”7 Newton breathed a sigh of relief when he next

set eyes on his niece, who was as beautiful as ever.

It was not Catherine’s looks alone that charmed the usually

stern Newton and the members of his social circle. She appears to

have been the one relative of her uncle’s who was gifted beyond

the ordinary. Not only was Catherine graceful and pleasant to gaze

at, but she was witty and well read, traits that gained her many

admirers among important political and literary figures.

Newton’s friend and patron Charles Montague wrote poetry

in Catherine’s honor and toasted her charms at the Kit-Kat Club,

a fashionable association founded by the Whig politician Chris-

topher “Kit” Cate. Jonathan Swift, the famed author of Gulliver’sTravels, became her cherished friend. Swift thought Catherine an

excellent conversationalist and a clever gossip whose company

he never tired of. “I went to see [Miss] Barton this morning,” he

wrote a friend. “I love her better than anybody here, and see her

seldomer. So it often happens in the world.”8


When Swift spoke of love, he meant the deepest kind of friend-

ship, but the hearts of others spoke romance. Rémond de

Monmort, a French official, fell head over heels for Catherine

during a visit to London, in spite of the fact that he had left a

Madame de Monmort back in Paris. “I have adored her not only

for her great beauty but for her lively and refined wit,” Monmort

confided to his friend Brooke Taylor of the Royal Society. “If I

had the good fortune to be near her, I would henceforth become

as awkward as I was the first time we met.”9 As far as Newton was

concerned, no one since Fatio de Dullier had so deeply stirred his

feelings. Catherine’s gaiety, charm, and warmth made coming

home from the mint on chill winter afternoons a genuine pleasure

for the aging lion.

From Newton’s point of view, Thomas Neale, the master of the

mint, was nothing but a drone who performed no work and pro-

duced no honey. In other words, Neale was typical of most gov-

ernment officials who had secured comfortable positions

through their high connections, then proceeded to enjoy the

good life while underlings carried on the business of the day.

The only good thing about Neale was that he gave the inexhaust-

ible Newton free reign, enabling his second in command to mas-

ter every detail of managing the mint. Then, on December 23,

1699, Thomas Neale died. Because the master had been seri-

ously ill for months, it is likely that an agreement had already

been reached concerning his successor. Two days later, on

Christmas Day, Isaac Newton became master of the mint, a most

welcome present on this, his fifty-seventh birthday. Whereas

Neale had earned thousands of pounds every year, Newton had

been working for a few hundred. This, too, suddenly changed.

The new master saw his annual income multiply as much as

1 0 0 I S A A C N E W T O N

tenfold, elevating an already wealthy man to the equivalent of a

modern millionaire.

Ever conservative in matters involving his finances, Newton

had not resigned the Lucasian professorship when he left Cam-

bridge in 1696. Thus, if London did not suit his tastes, or if he

suddenly found himself in danger of losing his position, he

could always return to a post that had served him well. He cau-

tiously waited another two years, during which he earned several

thousand pounds as master, before he decided to cut his academic

ties with the university. In December 1701, Newton gave up his

professorship, but not before he handpicked his successor, a

young mathematician named William Whiston who shared his

secret and politically dangerous religious views.

As a gesture of respect, Newton was once again elected to Par-

liament by the university, and once again the records indicate that

he said nothing during the long and often bitterly charged de-

bates. However, the life of this Parliament was brief. A sickly Wil-

liam III breathed his last on May 7, 1702, and Princess Anne

ascended the English throne. As was customary, the queen dis-

solved Parliament and called for new elections. When Newton

was asked by the Cambridge authorities if he wished to run again,

he politely declined: “And now I have served you in this Parlia-

ment, other gentlemen may expect their turn in the next.”10

Though he would remain a political appointee the rest of his life,

Newton’s days as a politician were over.

1 0 1T H E R O Y A L S O C I E T Y

Ten

T H E R O Y A L S O C I E T Y

EVER SINCE HE ARRIVED IN LONDON, NEWTON HAD KEPT HIS DISTANCE

from the Royal Society, the scientific institution through which

he gained lasting fame. When asked why he did not become more

involved, he claimed that his duties at the mint demanded all his

time. There were those who knew better, however. The real rea-

son Newton did not attend the meetings was an old grudge he

had nursed ever since his reflecting telescope was carried to Lon-

don by his friend Isaac Barrow.

It was then that Robert Hooke, the curator of experiments for

the Royal Society, had argued that he had developed a smaller

and more accurate instrument. Hooke had also criticized Newton’s

theory of light and claimed gravity as another of his mental inven-

tions, causing a skeptical Edmond Halley to take the coach to

Cambridge in hopes of settling the matter once and for all. And

though they had engaged in an outwardly civil correspondence


over the years, Newton hated Hooke, while Hooke wrote in his

diary that he dreamed Newton had died.

At age sixty-eight, Robert Hooke, who was largely responsible

for the breathtaking reconstruction of London after the Great

Fire, had been reduced to a shriveled, pain-racked husk. He no

longer attended meetings of the Royal Society and was living what

one biographer termed “a dying life.” Nearly blind and bedrid-

den, the man of a thousand ideas—some brilliant and some crack-

pot—died on March 3, 1703. Hooke left no will and his money,

which he liked to keep handy, was found locked in an iron chest.

Six months later, the Fellows of the Royal Society assembled

for the annual election of its twenty-one-member council and of-

ficers. When the ballots were counted, Isaac Newton, who had

suddenly taken a renewed interest in the society’s affairs, was cho-

sen president.

Newton may well have asked himself, “President of what?” The

treasury of the society was bare; new scientific ideas were as scarce

as hen’s teeth; and the number of Fellows had declined from two

hundred in 1680 to a little over one hundred on the eve of his

presidency. Worse yet, few members attended the society’s weekly

meetings and fewer still the council, which sometimes made its

decisions at gatherings little larger than the foursome needed for

a game of bridge.

When discussions took place, they were mainly devoted to

medicine or the anatomy of exotic beasts. The Fellows, many of

whom were physicians, doted on live specimens of crocodiles,

armadillos, and opossums. They were fascinated by presentations

on the merits of various poisons employed by convicted murder-

ers, and debated the medicinal value of pig’s urine, a far cry from

the days when the laws governing the universe were the main topic


of concern. Matters had gotten so far out of hand that the Fellows

became the butt of jibes by anonymous pamphleteers. They were

accused of searching for a deer in the belly of a snake, of finding

an egg in the tail of a barnacle, of sorting “lady’s bugs,” and of

witnessing a shower of fish followed by a shower of butter in which

to cook them. Indeed, it seemed that everyone was laughing—

everyone, that is, but the new president, who was little known for

his sense of humor.

So few members showed up at one of the first meetings chaired

by Newton that it had to be canceled. The angry president re-

acted by drafting a master plan entitled a “Scheme for establish-

ing the Royal Society,” a blunt way of stating that the organization

no longer existed and had to begin anew. First, he wrote, the soci-

ety must return to its original mission, that of “discovering the

frame & operations of Nature, reducing them (as far as may be) to

general Rules or Laws, establishing those Rules by observations

& experiments, and then deducing the causes & effects of things.”1

To those familiar with the new natural philosophy, Newton was

calling for the application of Galileo’s scientific method.

To carry out this work, Newton recommended the appoint-

ment of four paid “demonstrators” who would attend all meet-

ings and present regularly scheduled experiments and lectures

in mechanics and mathematics, optics and astronomy, zoology,

chemistry, and botany. While he could never bring himself to

mention Hooke by name, there is no question that Newton was

thinking of just such a model multiplied by four. To accomplish

these things the Royal Society had to have a permanent resi-

dence, dozens of active members, and a replenished treasury—

matters that Newton addressed in the second part of his ambitious

scheme.


Ever since receiving its charter in 1662, the society had met at

Gresham College in Bishopsgate Street. This vast timber-and-

brick mansion was originally constructed as a private residence

by the wealthy merchant Sir Thomas Gresham, who toasted

Queen Elizabeth with wine laced with the essence of pearls in the

great dining hall. Having no rooms of their own, the Fellows as-

sembled in the apartments of various professors over the years,

the last being the quarters of the recently deceased Robert Hooke.

It was Newton’s plan either to construct or to purchase a home

for the society. To accomplish this he would have to raise funds

from the Fellows, many of whose membership fees had not been

paid for years. After much debate, the council approved the

president’s proposal that every candidate for membership must

pay the admission fee and sign a bond for his weekly dues before

his induction. Fellows who had not previously signed a bond were

now called on to do so, and no member who failed to comply or

who was behind in his dues could serve on the council. Despite

many complaints and much grumbling, money began to trickle

in. The society was also given some stock in the East India and

the East Africa Companies, which had been formed to increase

trade in the expanding British Empire.

Working closely and in secret with Royal Society Secretary

Hans Sloane, Newton spent the next few years scouring London

for a suitable headquarters while the treasury grew. Although regu-

lar meetings were suspended during the summer months, the

council was suddenly called into emergency session in Septem-

ber 1710. With the help of Sir Christopher Wren, Newton had

located a house in Crane Court off bustling Fleet Street, which

was available for the sum of 1,450 pounds. Newton gained the

council’s approval, and when the society next met on October


26, the president proudly reported that the sale had been com-

pleted. Those on the council who had opposed his plan were

soundly defeated when they stood for reelection a month later, a

lesson to anyone who thought of crossing swords with the unfor-

giving president.

Ruling with the hand of a monarch, Newton had moved the

Royal Society onto firm financial ground after fifty years of hand-

to-mouth existence. When the planned remodeling of the new

quarters was completed ten months later, the society assembled

around its unchallenged leader like obedient members of court.

According to the newly passed Orders of the Council, only the

president was permitted to sit at the head of the table, with the

two secretaries at the lower end, one on either side. No talking

was permitted among members during the meetings unless they

first addressed themselves to the president. Still not satisfied,

Newton established the practice that the mace, the symbol of au-

thority, could be placed on the table only when the president oc-

cupied the chair. On those occasions when he was absent and the

vice president took his place, the mace remained in its stand. Dr.

William Stukeley, the young Lincolnshire physician who was later

befriended by Newton, described the scene: “Whilst Newton pre-

sided in the Royal Society, he executed that office with singular

prudence, with grace and dignity. He was very careful of giving

any sort of discouragement to all attempts of improvement in

natural knowledge. There was no whispering, talking, nor loud

laughters. Everything was transacted with great attention and

solemnity and decency. Indeed his presence created a natural

awe in the assembly.”2

Fully assured of his place in history, Newton had his image re-

produced ever more frequently as he grew older. He posed for a


second portrait by Godfrey Kneller in 1702 and another by

Charles Jervas only a year later, as he was about to become presi-

dent of the Royal Society. In Jervas’s work the natural philoso-

pher sits stiffly in a high-back armchair, his head crowned by a

flowing wig, his right forefinger pointing to an untitled book lying

on a nearby table. The bulging eyes challenge the viewer to blink

first, a contest Newton always wins. This is an image of complete

control and supreme accomplishment, the very one he wished to

project for future generations. He later presented the Jervas por-

trait to the Royal Society, where it is still displayed like a sacred

object. Meanwhile, the only known painting of Hooke mysteri-

ously vanished during the Royal Society’s move from Gresham

College to Crane Court, raising strong suspicions that Newton

himself was responsible for its disappearance.

In April 1705, Queen Anne, accompanied by her simple but

amiable husband, Prince George of Denmark, set out from Lon-

don for the royal residence at Newmarket. The main reason for

the journey was to attend the annual races, where the best horses

in the kingdom charged across Newmarket heath and over the

Devil’s Dyke, an ancient earthwork. The party then made its way

to nearby Cambridge, where the queen was met by the mayor on

the broad green known as Christ’s Pieces. From there Anne led

her court and a host of trailing officials to Trinity Lodge, home of

Richard Bentley, the master of Trinity College. Three aging men

were summoned and, on entering the room, they knelt before the

queen. A royal proclamation was read and a sword drawn. The

blade was touched to each man’s shoulders, thus creating three

new knights of the realm: Sir John Ellis, Sir James Montague, and

Sir Isaac Newton. A sumptuous dinner was later given for the

queen in newly redecorated Trinity Hall, where the most illustri-


ous guest after Anne herself had waited tables and taken his meals

some forty-five years earlier.

The royal party soon left Cambridge, but Newton lingered for

a time. This was a moment to be savored. Shunned by all but a

handful of students as a professor, he suddenly found himself the

object of their undivided attention. “We always took care on Sun-

day to place ourselves before him,” one of them wrote many years

later. “As he sat with the heads of the colleges, we gaz’d on him,

never enough satisfy’d, as on someone divine.”3

Despite his many other duties, Newton had not abandoned his

pursuit of science. On February 16, 1704, Secretary Hans Sloane

made the following entry in the Journal Book of the Royal Soci-

ety: “The President presented his book of Optics to the Society.

Mr. Halley was desired to peruse it and give an abstract of it to the

Society. The Society gave the President their thanks for the Book

and for his being pleased to Publish it.”4

In contrast to the Principia, whose publication was preceded

by considerable fanfare and much anticipation, nowhere in the

minutes of the Royal Society is the Opticks mentioned prior to its

coming off the press. And it is the only one of Newton’s major

works that he prepared for publication on his own. Nor did he

dedicate this second pillar of his great scientific legacy to the Royal

Society, as he had the first.

The reason for his silence becomes clear when one reads the

preface. Newton informs the reader that the volume is mainly the

product of research completed when he was a young man. “To

avoid being engaged in Disputes about these matters, I have hith-

erto delayed the printing, and should still have delayed it, had not

the Importunity of Friends prevailed upon me.”5 To make a long

story short, Newton had once again waited for Hooke to pass from


the scene before moving forward. His scarcely veiled reference to

the deceased curator of experiments was not easily mistaken by

those acquainted with the bitter controversy sparked by Newton’s

stunning paper on light written a generation before.

True to his professional ideals, which had been set out in his

“Scheme for establishing the Royal Society,” Newton informs the

reader of his intentions: “My Design in this Book is not to explain

the Properties of Light by Hypothesis, but to propose and prove

them by Reason and Experiments.”6 Thus the gifted theoretician,

whose genius had shown itself in the Principia, laid claim to equal

stature as an experimentalist, a rare combination in the history of

science.

Whereas the Principia is a mathematical work involving intri-

cate geometrical relationships and only a handful of major experi-

ments, the Opticks overflows with detailed accounts of reflection

and refraction, the separation of white light into the colors of the

spectrum, the manner of the eye’s operation, the formation of

images by lenses, the colors of the rainbow, the construction of

the reflecting telescope, and much more. Unable to contain him-

self, the author introduces many subjects that have little or noth-

ing to do with the behavior and analysis of light: metabolism and

digestion, the circulation of the blood, the creation of the world

and the Great Flood of Noah, the scientific method, even the im-

ages that haunt the dreams of madmen. Moreover, Newton wrote

the Opticks in English, making its contents accessible to a far wider

audience than the Principia, whose classical Latin had stymied

many potential readers. His friend John Locke, who had only

months to live, was baffled by the earlier work but read the Opticks“with pleasure, acquainting myself with every thing in them.”7


Yet even genius has it limits. Newton had delayed publication

of the Opticks for another reason besides his long and bitter run-

ning battle with Robert Hooke. He had always planned to pub-

lish the book in four parts rather than the three that finally went to

press. In that part of the manuscript he withheld, he wrote of at-

tempting to formulate a single principle with which to account

for the behavior of matter: “If Nature be most simple & fully con-

sonant to her self she observes the same method in regulating the

motions of smaller bodies [including the corpuscles of light] which

she doth in regulating those of the greater [the sun, moon, and

planets].”8 But just as in 1693, when he broke with Fatio de Dullier

and saw his alchemical experiments fall apart, he was unable to

find the universal principle he was seeking, gravity only being one

element of it. The dream of his early manhood had taken the form

of a nightmare that had lasted for thirty years. Even the presidency

of the Royal Society, the mastership of the mint, a knighthood,

and the publication of the greatest books of science ever written

could not make it go away.


Eleven

W A R

ISAAC NEWTON WAS NOT THE ONLY KEEPER OF A KINGDOM WHO AROSE

early and worked deep into the night. John Flamsteed, who, in

1675, was appointed England’s first astronomer royal by King

Charles II, came calling so early one morning that Newton was

still in bed. While waiting for his host to dress, Flamsteed read

one of Newton’s Bibles and reminded himself that he must keep

calm no matter how irritating Newton might be. He considered

him to be “a good man at bottom,” but highly suspicious and too

easily influenced by others. More than anyone else, Flamsteed

blamed Edmond Halley for the shabby way Newton had been

treating him of late. Looking the part of a dour Puritan minister in

the portrait of him that hangs in the Royal Society, Flamsteed sus-

pected that Halley was an atheist, an unbeliever who mocked the

religious behind their backs.

Suddenly Flamsteed had what he thought was a brilliant idea.

He scribbled a note and hid it in Newton’s Bible: “Read Jeremiah,

1 1 1WA R

chapter 10 to the 10th verse,” a declaration against false prophets

and liars. Flamsteed later confided to a friend, “I do not know

whether he has seen it, but I think he cannot take it amiss if he

has. I have showed him the way of the world much better than

politics or a play could do.”1

While Halley had his jocular moments when he poked fun at

the overly zealous, it is doubtful that he rejected organized reli-

gion out of hand and more doubtful still that Newton would have

associated with him if he had. The real source of Newton’s dis-

content with Flamsteed, which had reached the point where the

astronomer no longer attended the meetings of the Royal Society,

was Flamsteed’s refusal to yield to Newton’s every demand. New-

ton was anxious to publish a second edition of the Principia, and

he needed data on the motions of the moon and planets that

Flamsteed was gathering at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich,

a pleasant boat ride down the Thames from London.

Had Newton been more diplomatic, there is little doubt that

Flamsteed would have been more cooperative. For all his bluster,

and despite his roughshod treatment at Newton’s hands,

Flamsteed was in awe of the man and simply wanted to be treated

with dignity. Moreover, Flamsteed was inching his way toward

the completion of a work upon which his own fame would rest,

the projected Historia Coelestis (History of the Heavens), the most

ambitious catalog of the stars ever undertaken.

When Flamsteed had asked Newton to visit Greenwich to see

firsthand what he was doing, Newton declined the invitation, as

had Halley. Flamsteed then called on Newton at his home, only to

be rejected a second time. No shrinking violet, the astronomer

royal proceeded to lecture Newton, who was rarely challenged to

his face. Comparing himself to those who labored on London’s


great St. Paul’s Cathedral, Flamsteed complained: “I had hewed

the materials out of the rock, brought them together, and formed

them” and “that hands and time were to be allowed to perfect the

building and cover it.”2 Newton grudgingly admitted that he had

a point, but once Flamsteed was out of sight the quarrel escalated

into war.

Whereas Flamsteed accused Newton of sending his young dis-

ciples to Greenwich to spy on his progress, Newton railed against

Flamsteed’s secrecy and intentional dawdling. What rankled New-

ton even more was the fact that for the first time in his profes-

sional life someone else was in control: Flamsteed possessed

something that Newton had wanted desperately for years, and

Flamsteed well knew it.

Grasping the nettle, Newton went at last to Greenwich to dine

in April 1704. Relishing the circumstances, an unwise Flamsteed

informed Newton of some faults he had uncovered in the fourth

book of the Principia, “which instead of thanking me for, he re-

sented ill.” When the conversation then turned to the recently is-

sued Opticks, a copy of which Newton had sent to Greenwich,

things went no smoother. “I thanked him for his book: he said

then he hoped I approved it. I told him truly no.” Yet Flamsteed

admitted privately that “upon trial all the experiments succeeded

as Newton related them, which kept me quiet and in suspense.”3

When Prince George visited Greenwich a few months later, he

offered to finance the printing of Flamsteed’s yet unfinished mas-

terpiece. Newton, who was not to be denied, got wind of the pro-

posal and moved swiftly to make certain that the astronomer royal

was in no position to refuse. At the next meeting of the Royal So-

ciety the president persuaded the Fellows to “encourage” Flam-

1 1 3WA R

steed’s publication. In another cunning move, Newton saw to it

that Prince George was elected a Fellow the following week.

Though he sputtered and squawked, Flamsteed was forced to

accept the royal offer, for princes were not to be flouted.

Even more galling was the fact that Newton, who had become

Flamsteed’s open enemy, was appointed head of a commission to

examine his papers and determine which of them were fit to print.

“With these persons,” Flamsteed lamented, “Sir Isaac Newton

began to act his part, and carry on his designs.”4 Savoring his tri-

umph, Newton drafted a letter commanding Flamsteed to bring

specimens of his work to a dinner with the commissioners, sign-

ing himself “Your very loving Friend & humble servant.”5

The next confrontation occurred when Flamsteed learned that

rather than publish all of his papers—including every major star

catalog from the Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy down to

Edmond Halley—Newton wanted to print only that material of

concern to him. He was especially interested in Flamsteed’s data

on the motions of the moon, which were critical to the refinement

of his work on gravity. It was at this point that Flamsteed decided

to block publication any way he could. Deadlock set in and New-

ton, try as he might, could not get Flamsteed to budge. Not until

April 1708, two years after the project began, did the first page of

Volume I of the Historia Coelestis emerge from the press. It would

be another four years before what Flamsteed considered to be his

mutilated work was finally between covers. Meanwhile, the bick-

ering and the sniping continued. Newton, who never truly suc-

ceeded in bending Flamsteed to his will, had the astronomer’s

name stricken from the list of Royal Society Fellows in 1709 for

nonpayment of dues. Flamsteed responded by drafting a bitter


letter to his friend Abraham Sharp: “Newton has been lately much

talked of; but not much to his advantage. Our society is ruined by

his close, politic, and cunning forecast.”6

In truth, Flamsteed was indulging in some wishful thinking.

Whatever else Newton might be guilty of, he had almost single-

handedly pulled the society back from the brink of disaster while

restoring its tarnished reputation. He was turning it into an inter-

national enterprise as well. Foreign membership more than

doubled during his presidency and included almost as many po-

litical figures as natural philosophers. He was especially fond of

ambassadors, who, like other distinguished visitors, were seated

in comfortable armchairs near the president and entertained by

experiments carefully chosen for their spectacular effects. On one

such occasion Senior Grimani, the Venetian ambassador, Signor

Gerardini, envoy from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the Duke

D’Armont, the French ambassador, were shown two preparations

“made of the veins and arteries of a human liver by injecting red

wax into them, which was very curiously and beautifully per-

formed.”7 They also saw light produced by friction and were

treated to a demonstration of the power of gravity in a vacuum.

But mostly those who served kings and queens and princes came

to look upon Newton himself, who had attained the stature of a

living god.

After occupying several different residences, Newton finally

settled at 35 St. Martin’s Street in the parish of Westminster, now

a part of greater London. Leicester House, as this stone dwelling

became known, was a three-story structure to which its new oc-

cupant is believed to have added an observatory. Whether by

Catherine Barton’s choice or his own, Newton was surrounded

with furnishings of red. The chairs and sofa were covered in red

1 1 5WA R

upholstery; the draperies were of the same color; red pillows and

a matching coverlet decorated his bed, next to which stood a red

settee on which he napped after coming home from the mint.

Among his other new furnishings were an expensive bell for sum-

moning servants, two bottle racks, three beer stands, and a wooden

tub. Of his plans for the tub, a widow living nearby is said to have

reported that “every morning he takes his seat in front of a tub of

soap-suds, and occupies himself for hours blowing soap-bubbles

through a common clay-pipe intently watching till they burst.”8

Like so many stories about the great man, this one seems more

fiction than fact, but it is nice to imagine a Newton human enough

to delight in this childhood pleasure.

The second edition of the Principia, to be followed by a third,

was published in 1713, much to the relief of anxious scholars.

The first edition had been limited to a few hundred copies and

these had long since sold out. For those wealthy enough, a used

volume could be had for the considerable sum of two guineas.

Those less well off were reduced to the tedious labor of copying it

out page by page.

The task of publishing the work so admirably performed by

Halley for the first edition now fell to Richard Bentley, a classical

scholar and master of Trinity College. Bentley’s motives were

less pure than Halley’s had been, for he made it clear that it was

the love of money rather than of natural philosophy that caused

him to undertake the work. Moreover, Bentley was not grounded

in the finer points of analytical geometry and had to recruit Roger

Cotes, a young professor of astronomy and natural philosophy,

to deal with the many technical matters. The enterprise was fur-

ther tainted by Newton’s ill treatment of Flamsteed. He had

hounded the astronomer royal for years, employing virtually


every dirty trick imaginable in an effort to gain control of his

lifework. After expelling the astronomer from the Royal Society,

he systematically pirated his observations for what he believed to

be a “higher” purpose.

Only years later did Flamsteed gain a measure of revenge. He

undertook the printing of a complete edition of the HistoriaCoelestis, restoring all the star catalogs and other papers Newton

had so shamefully omitted. Then, for good measure, Flamsteed

purchased every available copy printed by Newton and cast them

into the fire, a ritual act of purification.

Already involved in a long and brutal war on one front, New-

ton became engaged in another. If judged solely on looks, his lat-

est opponent seemed little more threatening than the bent and

twisted Hooke. Indeed, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz was

stooped at the waist and of medium height; his broad shoulders

sat atop a thick torso propelled about by bandy legs and tiny feet.

Beneath his dark eyes and long fleshy nose was a large mouth that

turned up at the corners, like the cat who has secretly swallowed

the canary. Yet it was not Leibniz’s looks that mattered in his com-

ing battle with Newton but his wits, which Leibniz, a genius in

his own right, possessed in plenty.

Remembered more for his works as a philosopher than any-

thing else, the tireless German scholar was equally well versed in

the fields of theology, history, mathematics, law, mechanics, lan-

guages, and geology. While Newton was drafting the first papers

on the calculus that would one day lock the two in mortal combat,

twenty-year-old Leibniz was composing a brilliant treatise entitled

On the Art of Combination, a model of logical analysis that has

been credited as the ancestor of the modern computer. Equally

skilled with his hands, the young German constructed an auto-

1 1 7WA R

matic calculating machine, which he carried to London for the

education and pleasure of the Royal Society Fellows, who gladly

welcomed him into their company, as they had Newton on the

delivery of his telescope.

Leibniz’s rapid advance as a mathematician was second only

to Newton’s. By the waning months of 1675, he had developed

the same fluxional method, or calculus, that Newton had formu-

lated a decade earlier. This was not a case of theft, as Newton

would later charge, but of independent formulation on Leibniz’s

part. Moreover, he introduced a superior system of notation in

his equations, which eventually replaced Newton’s more cumber-

some method and is still in use today.

As one of the few who knew of Newton’s mathematical ge-

nius early on, John Collins had pleaded with him to publish.

But Newton preferred secrecy to publicity and missed his chance

to establish clear-cut priority. To make matters worse, Leibniz

had visited London in 1676. Unbeknown to Newton, the visi-

tor was given access to his mathematical papers—including the

calculus—by Collins, who was deeply impressed by the level of

the German’s scholarship. Collins also wanted Leibniz and his

fellow Europeans to know just how great Newton was as a math-

ematician. Leibniz proceeded to take notes from certain of the

papers, but only later would it be discovered that he had copied

nothing of the calculus. The simplest explanation for his behav-

ior is also the most convincing: Leibniz had already mastered

the method on his own, so Newton had nothing to teach him on

the subject. He may even have prided himself on the superiority

of his notational system. Only after Collins had gone to his

grave years later would Newton learn of what was to him a great

betrayal.


Meanwhile, Newton and Leibniz entered into a correspondence

on mathematics. By his own admission, Newton was more than a

little impressed by Leibniz’s grasp of the subject. Still the English-

man was so sure of himself that he refused to discuss the calculus

openly, believing that no one else could achieve what he had ac-

complished as a young man in his early twenties. At the same time,

Leibniz, who knew Newton’s secret from having visited London,

confided to his friend Otto Menke: “Mr. Newton developed it

[the calculus], but I arrived at it by another way. One man makes

one contribution, another man another.”9

The inevitable storm broke in full fury in 1699, after Leibniz

published two papers on the revolutionary mathematics. He fur-

ther suggested in print that it was Newton who owed a debt to

him, an erroneous claim that was bound to provoke a heated re-

sponse. Not only had Newton been first, but he had solved two of

the most difficult challenge problems Johann Bernoulli could de-

vise, and Leibniz, who was Bernoulli’s friend, well knew it.

Though his close ties to Newton had been severed, Fatio de

Dullier rushed to his defense. He stated in print that Newton was

not only the “first inventor of the calculus,” he was the earliest by

many years. Whether Leibniz was the second inventor he would

leave to the judgment of others. No one who examines the records

will be deceived by Leibniz’s claim “to the invention of the calcu-

lus for himself.”10

Leibniz, who was deeply angered by the suggestion that he had

stolen from Newton, wrote a sharp letter of protest to the Royal

Society. Still not satisfied, he penned a review for the ActaEruditorum (Transactions of the Learned), refuting Fatio’s

charges and laying the blame for the attack on his honor at

1 1 9WA R

Newton’s door. No less angered himself, Newton was heard to

thunder more than once: “Second inventors count for nothing!”11

The conflict entered a new and even more brutal stage follow-

ing the publication of the Opticks in 1704. Two mathematical pa-

pers were printed at the end of the work, and in the preface Newton

wrote that years ago he had lent out a manuscript of these papers

and implied that Leibniz had stolen from it. Leibniz responded

by writing a second review for the Acta in an attempt to turn the

tables. Newton’s fluxions, Leibniz charged, were merely the cal-

culus by another name. Like a master counterfeiter, Newton had

disguised his forged coin by devising a clever method of notation

to conceal his debt to Leibniz.

So the war went, measure for measure, blow for blow, with

many of them being struck by the undignified disciples of two

geniuses in language that today would result in charges of libel.

Finally, a weary Leibniz had had enough and decided to appeal

to the ultimate forum, the Royal Society itself.

His long letter was read at the meeting of January 31, 1712,

and duly entered in the record. He had endured enough “empty

and unjust braying” on the part of Newton’s defenders. Even his

rival must disapprove of the unending assault on his honor: “I am

confident that he will freely give evidence of his opinion on this

issue.”12

Too late did Leibniz realize that he had committed a huge blun-

der; indeed, he had played directly into Newton’s hands. The

president hit upon a devilishly clever scheme. Leibniz wanted

justice. Very well, let him have it. The Royal Society would ap-

point a special committee to settle the nagging priority issue—

winner take all.


Newton took great pains to make it appear as if the committee

was impartial. Eleven men of differing backgrounds, occupations,

and political loyalties were chosen to weigh the evidence. He boasted

that the group was “skillful and composed of Gentlemen of sev-

eral nations, and the Society are satisfied in their Fidelity without

adding, omitting or altering any thing in favor of either Party.”13

In truth, Newton had handpicked every committee member, stack-

ing the deck against a faraway Leibniz from the beginning.

Newton’s treachery was compounded by the fact that the

committee’s detailed report was ready in a month and a half, al-

though the last member was appointed only a week before its re-

lease. The names of those who served appear nowhere in the

document, nor did their identities become public knowledge un-

til a century later, when the Royal Society’s minutes were pub-

lished. Even so, none of this mattered in light of the later discovery

that it was Newton himself who compiled the evidence and drafted

the report that was issued under the title Commercium Epistolicum(Letter on Trade). Every move Leibniz had made, from his Lon-

don visits to his choice of notation for the calculus, was cast in a

suspicious light.

Aside from the relatively few who knew better, it appeared that

Leibniz was an intellectual thief who had cleverly stolen Newton’s

creation and claimed it as his own. The Fellows approved the re-

port to a man and agreed that it should be published as soon as

possible. Nine months later, in January 1713, the Commerciumcame off the press. Newton personally saw to it that copies reached

the institutions and persons that mattered most, especially

Leibniz’s European colleagues, who looked upon him as a saint

among mathematicians.

1 2 1WA R

Leibniz died three years later, and it would take more than two

centuries before the whole truth behind this ugly story became

known. Even after his enemy was no more, Newton could not let

go. A friend of William Whiston, Newton’s successor as Lucasian

professor, reported that he once heard Newton pleasantly remark

that “He had broke Leibniz’s Heart with his Reply to him.”14


Twelve

“ L I K E A B O Y O N T H E

S E A S H O R E ”

JOHN CONDUITT, THE SON OF A WEALTHY FAMILY FROM THE COUNTY

of Hampshire in southern England, became a familiar face at

Leicester House in the summer of 1717. While there is no doubt

that the young man was in awe of Sir Isaac Newton, the primary

reason for his frequent visits had nothing to do with science, math-

ematics, or the operations of the mint. Conduitt came to 35 St.

Martin’s Street to court Catherine Barton, who at thirty-eight years

of age was nine years older than her suitor, but still very beautiful.

Conduitt had served as a captain with the British Army in Spain,

where he identified the site of Carteia, a lost city once occupied

by the Romans. When word of his discovery reached the Royal

Society back in London, he was invited to read a paper on the

subject, which he did upon his return to England three months

later. It was there that he first met Newton, who may have invited

him to Leicester House for dinner at which Catherine would have

presided as hostess.

1 2 3“ L I K E A B O Y O N T H E S E A S H O R E ”

The Hampshire gentleman and the independent-minded

beauty were wed on August 26, after a courtship lasting only a

few weeks. Catherine bore the couple’s first and only child, a

daughter, two years later. They baptized her Catherine and nick-

named her Kitty to avoid confusion with her mother. Tradition

holds that the Conduitts lived with Newton, who doted on his

grandniece. However, Catherine’s letters suggest that much of their

time was spent at Cranburg Park, the ancestral home of her de-

voted husband. After all, her uncle was protective of his privacy,

which would have been disturbed with a noisy toddler in his midst.

The family paid frequent visits during which Conduitt asked Sir

Isaac questions for a biography he planned to write of him, the

extensive notes for which survive. Newton formed a high opinion

of his nephew-in-law and began laying plans for the day when

Conduitt would succeed him as master of the mint.

In 1722, as Newton was nearing his eightieth birthday, he re-

ceived a painful reminder of his mortality. Taken seriously ill with

kidney stones, he was gradually nursed back to health by his per-

sonal physician and Royal Society Fellow, Dr. Richard Mead. “I

am getting well little by little,” he wrote a friend, but in truth he

had entered a period of irreversible decline.1 There is little to in-

dicate that he had mellowed with age. It was not his way. He still

relished a quarrel and fought on in print with the followers of

Leibniz, although the other creator of the calculus was long in his

grave. He now experienced the ultimate triumph of outliving those

who had dared to challenge or cross him. He was internationally

famous, and his hard-won glory made it worthwhile to endure.

There were many requests for audiences with the old giant,

but Catherine, who had moved back to London with her hus-

band and growing daughter, kept most of the curious at bay.


Among them was a young man from the American colonies named

Benjamin Franklin, who was just mastering the printer’s trade.

Franklin wrote in his diary of being promised “an opportunity of

some time or other of seeing Sir Isaac Newton, of which I was

extremely desirous; but this never happened.”2 Years later, after

he became famous for his brilliant experiments on electricity,

Franklin was awarded the Copley Medal, the highest prize given

by the Royal Society.

Another of those disappointed at not meeting Newton was a

young Frenchman named François Marie Arouet, who wrote un-

der the pen name Voltaire. The closest the critic of royal power in

France got was a meeting with Catherine. She matched wits with

her sharp-tongued visitor, whose ears pricked up when she told

him stories of her uncle and his sometimes peculiar habits.

Voltaire, who had the morals of a gossip columnist, repaid her

kindness by spreading scandal about his hostess in the drawing

rooms of London and Paris, not to mention in his books.

Among the few allowed to visit Newton was William Stukeley,

the young doctor from Lincolnshire. He credited Newton’s long

life to a strong constitution and regular habits. In 1725 Stukeley

watched in amazement as Newton added up a column of figures

without the aid of spectacles, pen, or ink. He told Stukeley that

his breakfast consisted of boiled orange peel, sweetened tea, and

a little bread with butter. He drank more water than when he was

a young man and took only a small amount of wine with his din-

ner. His other meals consisted mostly of broth, vegetables, and

fruit, “of which he always ate very heartily.”3 Never a large meat

eater, Newton had virtually given it up in recent years. Still

plagued by kidney stones, he also gave up riding in his carriage,

whose jostling over London’s cobblestone streets caused him


extreme discomfort. He was carried about by four men in a slower

but smooth-riding sedan chair, his arms dangling out of the open-

ings on either side. His eyes remained lively and piercing, while

his silver hair, which seemed never to have thinned, was described

by Stukeley as a “venerable sight” when his wig was removed.

More remarkable still for one who loved sweets and grew plump

from eating them, Newton had lost only a single tooth.

After Catherine’s marriage, Newton lived much as he always

had, taking his meals alone and passing most of his days in his

study, reading and writing. His once heavy duties at the mint were

lightened by Conduitt, and for a year before his death he rarely vis-

ited the tower. His excellent record of attendance at the Royal Soci-

ety became tarnished as age took its toll. More and more the mace

remained in its stand while the vice-president occupied the chair.

On occasion Newton surprised those who knew him by turn-

ing up at unexpected places. One evening a gathering of men from

Lincolnshire was held at the Ship Tavern. Stukeley was in the

upstairs dining room where “the better sort of company” had met

when someone reported that an old gentleman seen downstairs

was thought to be Sir Isaac Newton. The disbelieving doctor

rushed down and, to his complete surprise, spied Newton seated

alone. Word was sent up to the second floor, which soon emptied.

Surrounded by a captive audience, Newton told stories and gave

his opinion on many subjects, including opera, which was just

becoming popular. “‘I went to the last opera,’ says he, ‘The first

act gave me pleasure, the second quite tired me: at the third I ran

away.’”4 His opinion of poetry was no higher; he called it “a kind

of ingenious nonsense.”5

Three days later, Stukeley breakfasted with Newton and Halley,

who had replaced John Flamsteed as astronomer royal after


Flamsteed’s death. Newton used the occasion to blast the fallen

astronomer yet again. Flamsteed, he fumed, had provided him with

only a handful of observations when he was struggling to com-

plete his lunar theory. He owed the man nothing for whatever suc-

cess he had enjoyed on that score. He boasted that he could now

finish his work on the moon if he wanted to, “but rather he chose

to leave it to others.” On another occasion he told Halley he was

thinking of having one more “shake at the moon.” And to Ben-

jamin Smith, his nephew, he once spoke of having yet “another

touch at metals.”6 Such talk was based on the wistful thinking of

an old man to which Newton, of all persons, was certainly en-

titled. Yet these fancies are revealing for another reason. Newton

never believed that his natural philosophy had been brought to a

satisfactory conclusion, a painful thought he lived with to the end.

Surprising as it may seem for a man of his careful habits, New-

ton drafted no will. Besides having given to various charities and

to the Royal Society, much of his fortune had already been ex-

pended on his relatives, many of whom were extremely careless

with money. His nieces and nephews by his stepbrother and step-

sisters did very well, as did the Conduitts and their daughter

Kitty, who received an estate in Kensington from her great-uncle

valued at 4,000 pounds.

On the last day of February 1727, Newton came into London

to preside at the March 2 meeting of the Royal Society. Conduitt

had not seen him looking so fit in years and told him so. A smil-

ing Newton replied that he had slept the Sunday before from

eleven at night to eight in the morning without waking. But by

the time he returned home it was apparent that the rigors of travel

had been too taxing. Another stone lodged itself in his bladder,

and the two doctors called in by Conduitt held out no hope for


recovery. Extreme pain alternated with brief periods of tranquil-

ity during the next several days. “Though the drops of sweat ran

down his face,” an anguished Conduitt wrote, “he never com-

plained, or cried out, or shewed the least signs of peevishness or

impatience.”7

Stukeley painted an even more dramatic picture of the death

scene: The pain “rose to such a height that the bed under him,

and the very room, shook with his agonys to the wonder of those

that were present. Such a struggle had his great soul to quit its

earthly tabernacle!”8 It was clearly with his soul that Newton re-

mained most concerned. He refused the final rites of the church,

the last act of a man who, for more than half a century, secretly

viewed the concept of the Trinity with horror. To yield at the last

minute would give Satan the triumph so long denied him by his

unbending foe.

On Wednesday, March 15, Newton rallied, raising hopes that

he might prove the experts wrong once again. But a few days later

he slipped into a coma, remaining unconscious until he died be-

tween one and two o’clock in the morning of March 20, at age

eighty-four. Not long before his passing he remarked, “I do not

know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to

have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting

myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell

than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered

before me.”9 Strangely, Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist since

Newton, also pictured himself as a child asking childlike ques-

tions: “What would the world look like if I could ride on a beam

of light?” It was Einstein who wrote of Sir Isaac, “Fortunate New-

ton, happy child of science. Nature to him was an open book,

whose letters he could read without effort.”10


On March 23 the following entry, simple yet touching, appeared

in the Journal Book of the Royal Society: “The Chair being Va-

cant by the Death of Sir Isaac Newton there is no Meeting this

Day.”11 Newton’s body lay in state in Westminster Abbey until

April 4, the day of the funeral. The coffin was carried into the

main sanctuary by the Lord High Chancellor, the Dukes of

Montrose and Roxborough, and the Earls of Pembroke, Sussex,

and Macclesfield, all noblemen and all members of the Royal So-

ciety. They were followed by the procession of mourners led by

Sir Michael Newton, a knight and distant relative of the fallen gi-

ant. The service was performed by the bishop of Rochester.

Newton’s final resting place was chosen for its prominence in

the nave of the great abbey. Nearby lie the stilled bards of Poet’s

Corner—Chaucer, Robert Browning, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Closest to Newton is the great astronomer Sir John Herschel, who

opened the night sky with telescopes as never before. Time, like a

slow and ancient glacier, washes through the sanctuary, its flow

wearing the pavement stones into small hollows. Its work is aided

by the countless thousands of awed visitors who come each year

to pause in silent tribute to the sacred permanence of the dead.

N O T E S

A B B R E V I AT I O N S O F F R E Q U E N T LY U S E D S O U R C E S

I.N. Corres. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton. Ed. by H. W.

Turnbull, J. F. Scott, A. R. Hall, and Laura Tilling. 7 vols.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–77.

Keynes MS. Keynes Manuscript Collection, King’s College Library,

Cambridge, England.

U.L.C. Add. MS. University Library Cambridge, Additional Manuscript,

Cambridge, England.

C H A P T E R O N E : “ T O P L AY P H I L O S O P H I C A L LY ”

1. Michael B. Young, Charles I (New York, 1997), 172.

2. Canon C. W. Foster, “Sir Isaac Newton’s Family,” Reports and Papers ofthe Architectural Societies of the County of Lincoln, County of York,Archdeaconries of Northampton and Oakham, and County of Leicester,XXXIX, pt. I (1928), 45–47.

3. Colsterworth Village Church: Parish Register (January 1, 1643).

4. Richard S. Westfall, “Short-Writing and the State of Newton’s Conscience,

1662 (I),” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 18 (June

1963), 13.

5. Keynes MS. 136, 4.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., 5.

8. U.L.C. Add. MS. 3975, 178.

9. Keynes MS. 136, 6–7.

10. Ibid., 6.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

1 2 9N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 – 1 1

C H A P T E R T W O : “ M Y G R E AT E R F R I E N D ”

1. Thomas Fuller, History of the University of Cambridge published with hisChurch-history of Britain (London, 1655), 122.

2. U.L.C. Add. MS. 3996. For a modern reproduction of the notebook see

Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton’s Trinity Notebook, ed. by J. E.

McGuire and T. Martin (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., ff. 88–89.

5. Ibid., f. 101v.

6. Keynes MS. 130 (10).

7. Roger North, The Lives of the Norths, ed. by Augustus Jessopp, 3 vols.

(London, 1890), III, 284.

8. I.N. Corres., III, 153.

9. U.L.C. Add. MS. 3996, f. 128.

10. U.L.C. Add. MS. 4007, ff. 706–7.

11. Keynes MS. 130 (7).

12. Keynes MS. 137.

13. Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. R4.48c.

14. Keynes MS. 136 (8).

C H A P T E R T H R E E : O F G E N I U S, F I R E , A N D P L A G U E

1. Thomas Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City (London, 1667), 29.

2. U.L.C. Add. MS. 3968.41, f. 85r.

3. William Whiston, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. WilliamWhiston, 2 vols. (London, 1749), I, 39.

4. William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life, ed. by A. Hastings

White (London, 1936), 19–20.

5. Henry Pemberton, A View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (London,

1728), Preface.

6. U.L.C. Add. MS. 3968.41, f. 85r.

7. Whiston, 36–37.

8. I.N. Corres., I, 92.

9. U.L.C. Add. MS. 3975, 12.

10. I.N. Corres., I, 92.

11. Canon C. W. Foster, “Sir Isaac Newton’s Family,” Reports and Papers ofthe Architectural Societies of the County of Lincoln, County of York,Archdeaconries of Northampton and Oakham, and County of Leister,

XXXIX, pt. I (1928), 3.

1 3 0 N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 2 – 3 3

C H A P T E R F O U R : T H E R E V O L U T I O N A R Y P R O F E S S O R

1. Fitzwilliam Museum Notebook, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, En-

gland, n.p.

2. Keynes MS. 130 (10), f. 2v.

3. I.N. Corres., I, 13.

4. Ibid., 14–15.

5. U.L.C. Add. MS. 4002, 1.

6. Quoted in Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton and Professor Cotes, ed. by

J. Edleston (London, 1950), xlii.

7. U.L.C. Add. MS. 4002, 22.

8. I.N. Corres., I, 3–4.

9. Ibid., 89.

10. Ibid., 82–83.

11. Ibid., 84.

12. Ibid., 102.

13. Ibid., 107.

14. Ibid., 109.

C H A P T E R F I V E : “ K I N D L I N G C O A L ”

1. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Robert Latham and William Matthews,

11 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972), VI, 36–37.

2. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. by O. L. Dick, 3rd ed. (London, 1968), 165.

3. I.N. Corres., I, 100.

4. Ibid., 110–11.

5. Ibid., 144.

6. Ibid., 109.

7. Ibid., 151.

8. Ibid., 171–72.

9. Ibid., 262.

10. Ibid., 282.

11. Ibid., 294–95.

12. Ibid., 328–29.

13. Ibid., 366.

14. The Diary of Robert Hooke, 1672–1680, ed. by Henry W. Robinson and

Walter Adams (London, 1968), 200, 205–6.

15. I.N. Corres., I, 405.

16. Ibid., 412.

17. Ibid., 413.

18. Ibid., 416.

19. Ibid., II, 6.

1 3 1N O T E S T O P A G E S 3 5 – 5 2

C H A P T E R S I X : T H E A L C H E M I ST

1. Keynes MS. 137.

2. Keynes MS. 135.

3. Ibid.

4. Gale E. Christianson, In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton andHis Times (New York, 1984), 204.

5. Isaiah, 45:3.

6. Keynes MS. 33, f. 5v.

7. Richard S. Westfall, “Short-Writing and the State of Newton’s Con-

science, 1662 (I),” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London (June

1963), 13.

8. Yahuda Manuscript Collection, Jewish National and University Library,

Jerusalem, Israel, MS. 1.1, f. 1.

9. Ibid., f. 16r. Newton quoting from Revelations 21:8.

C H A P T E R S E V E N : “ A B O O K N O B O DY U N D E R STA N D S ”

1. I.N. Corres., II, 433–35.

2. Ibid.

3. Keynes MS. 135.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. U.L.C. Add. MS. 4004, ff. 707r–707v.

8. Ibid.

9. I.N. Corres., II, 413.

10. Quoted in Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac New-ton (Cambridge, 1980), 452.

11. I.N. Corres., II, 435–37.

12. Keynes MS. 130 (6), Book 2.

13. Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. and

ed. by Andrew Motte, 1729. Revised by Florian Cajori (Berkeley and

Los Angeles, 1934), 415. See the Further Reading section in this book

for a more recent translation by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman.

14. Ibid., 435.

C H A P T E R E I G H T : “ Y O U R M O S T U N F O R T U N AT E S E RVA N T ”

1. I.N. Corres., II, 483.

2. Keynes MS. 130 (5).

3. Ibid., 135.

4. I.N. Corres., III, 279.

1 3 2 N O T E S T O P A G E S 5 4 – 8 4

5. Ibid., 280.

6. Ibid., 283.

7. Ibid., 283–84.

8. Louis Trenchard More, Isaac Newton: A Biography (London, 1934), 389.

C H A P T E R N I N E : M A R K O F T H E L I O N

1. I.N. Corres., IV, 188.

2. Guzman Redivivus. A Short View of the Life of Will Chaloner (London,

1699), 4.


4. John Craig, “Isaac Newton and the Counterfeiters,” Notes and Records ofthe Royal Society of London, 18 (1963), 139.

5. The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, ed. by D. T. Whiteside, 8 vols.

(Cambridge, 1981), VIII, 9.

6. The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. by E. S. De Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1955), V,

284, fn. 5.


8. Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, ed. by Harold Williams (Oxford, 1948),

229–30.

9. Brooke Taylor, Contemplatio philosophica (London, 1793), 93.

10. I.N. Corres., IV, 382–83.

C H A P T E R T E N : T H E R O YA L S O C I E T Y

1. U.L.C. Add. MS. 4005.2, f. 1.


White (London, 1936), 78.

3. Ibid., 10.

4. Journal Book (Copy) of the Royal Society, London, England, X, 63–64.

5. Isaac Newton, Opticks Or A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, In-flections and Colours of Light (New York, 1952), ccxi. See the Further

Reading section in this book for a more recent edition.

6. Ibid., 1.

7. Jean-Theophile Desaguliers, Course of Experimental Philosophy, 3rd ed.

(London, 1763), viii.

8. U.L.C. Add. MS. 3970.3, f. 336.

C H A P T E R E L E V E N : WA R

1. Francis Bailey, An Account of the Revd John Flamsteed, the First Astrono-mer Royal (London, 1835), 174–75.

2. Ibid.

1 3 3N O T E S T O P A G E S 8 4 – 1 1 2

3. Ibid., 72, 216.

4. Ibid., 77.


6. Bailey, 272.

7. Charles R. Weld, A History of the Royal Society, 2 vols. (London, 1848), I,

419, and Journal Book (Copy) of the Royal Society, London, England, X,

483.

8. H.D. Anthony, Sir Isaac Newton (London, 1966), 197.

9. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, ser. I (Berlin,

1923), IV, 475–77.

10. Nicolas Fatio de Dullier, Lineae brevissimi descensus investigatio geo-metrica duplex (London, 1699), 18.

11. U.L.C. Add. MS. 3968.37, f. 539r.

12. I.N. Corres., V, 207–8.

13. Journal Book (Copy) of the Royal Society, X, 369, 375, 377, 386.

14. William Whiston, Historical Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Samuel Clarke(London, 1730), 132.

C H A P T E R T W E LV E : “ L I K E A B O Y O N T H E S E A S H O R E ”

1. I.N. Corres., VII, 205.

2. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. by Leonard W. Labaree,

Ralph L. Ketcham, Helen C. Boatfield, and Helene H. Fineman (New

Haven, 1964), 97.

3. Collections for the History of the Town and Soke of Grantham, ed. by

Edmund Turnor (London, 1806), 165.


White (London, 1936), 13–14, 66.

5. Richard de Villamil, Newton: The Man (London, 1931), 10.

6. Keynes MS. 130 (6).

7. Ibid., Book I.

8. Turnor, 166; Stukeley, 82–83.

9. Turnor, 173, fn. 2.

10. Isaac Newton, “Opticks Or A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, In-flections, and Colours of Light (New York, 1952), Foreward, lix.

11. Journal Book (Copy) of the Royal Society, London, England, XIII, 62.

1 3 4 N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 1 2 – 1 2 8

1 3 5F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

Note: The literature on Newton is a vast and rapidly expanding one. While

the following bibliography is far from comprehensive, it should address the

curiosity of readers seeking knowledge beyond that imparted in these pages.

Andrade, Edward Neville da Costa. Sir Isaac Newton. London: Collins, 1954.

Anthony, H. D. Sir Isaac Newton. London: Abelard-Schuman, 1960.

Ariew, Roger. The Correspondence of G. W. Leibniz and Samuel Clarke. India-

napolis: Hackett, 2000.

Bailey, Francis. An Account of the Revd John Flamsteed, the First AstronomerRoyal. London, 1835.

Bate, John. The Mysteries of Nature and Art. 3rd ed. London: Andrew Crooke,

1654.

Berlinski, David. How Newton Unlocked the System of the World. New York:

The Free Press, 2000.

Bixby, William. The Universe of Galileo and Newton. New York: American

Heritage Publishing Company, 1964.

Boorstin, Daniel J. The Discoverers. New York: Random House, 1983.

Brewster, David. Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir IsaacNewton. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1965.

Butts, Robert E., and John W. Davis. The Methodological Heritage of Newton.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970.

Challis, C. E., ed. A New History of the Royal Mint. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1992.

Christianson, Gale E. In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and HisTimes. New York: Free Press, 1984.

———. “Newton, the Man—Again.” In Newton’s Scientific and PhilosophicalLegacy, eds. P. B. Scheuer and G. Debrock. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic

Publishers, 1988: 2–21.

Clark, David H., and Stephen P. H. Clark. Newton’s Tyranny: Suppressed Sci-entific Discoveries of Stephen Gray and John Flamsteed. New York: W. H.

Freeman, 2000.

1 3 6 F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

Cohen, I. Bernard. Introduction to Newton’s Principia. Cambridge: Cambridge


———, ed. Isaac Newton’s Papers and Letters on Natural Philosophy andRelated Documents. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978.

———, and George E. Smith. Cambridge Companion to Newton. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002.

———, and R. S. Westfall. Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries. New

York: Norton, 1995.

Cook, Alan. Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1998.

Craig, John. Newton at the Mint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1946.

De Beer, E. S., ed. The Diary of John Evelyn. Oxford University Press, 1955;

reprinted 2000.

De Morgan, Augustus. Newton: His Friend: and His Niece. London: Dawsons,

reprinted 1968.

Desaguliers, Jean-Theophile. Course of Experimental Philosophy. London:

1763.

Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter. The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy. Cambridge:


———. The Janus Face of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

———, and Margaret C. Jacob. Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism.Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995.

Fatio de Dullier, Nicolas. Lineae brevissimi descensus investigatio geometricaduplex. London, 1699.

Fauvel, John, et al. Let Newton Be! New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Feingold, Mordechai, ed. Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Gill, Mary Louise, and James G. Lennox. Self-Motion from Aristotle to New-ton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Gjertsen, Derek. The Newton Handbook. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,

1986.

Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. New York: Pantheon, 2003.

Greenstreet, W. J., ed. Isaac Newton 1642–1727: A Memorial Volume. Lon-

don: G. Bell and Sons, 1927.

Hall, A. R. All Was Light: An Introduction to Newton’s Optics. Oxford: The

Clarendon Press, 1995.

———. Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell,

1992.


———. Philosophers at War: The Quarrel Between Newton and Leibniz. Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Hall, Marie Boas. Henry Oldenburg: Shaping the Royal Society. Oxford: Ox-

ford University Press, 2002.

Harrison, John R. The Library of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1978.

Hawking, Stephen, ed. On the Shoulders of Giants: Principia. Philadelphia:

Running Press, 2005.

Herivel, John. The Background to Newton’s Principia: A Study of Newton’sDynamical Researches in the Years 1664–1684. Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1965.

Hooke, Robert. An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth from Observa-tions. London: Royal Society, 1674.

———. Micrographia: or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute BodiesMade by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries thereupon.London: J. Martin and J. Allestray: 1665.

Hurlbutt III, Robert H. Hume, Newton, and the Design Argument. Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 1985.

Jacob, Margaret. The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720.Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1976.

Jardine, Lisa. The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured Lon-don. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

Keynes, John Maynard. “Newton the Man.” The Royal Society of London: New-ton Tercentenary Celebrations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1947: 27–34.

Klawans, Harold L. Newton’s Madness. New York: Harper and Row, 1990.

Koyré, Alexandre. Newtonian Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 1965.

Labaree, Leonard W., et al., eds. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964.

Latham, Robert, and William Matthews, eds. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Ber-

keley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970–1983.

Lerner, Aaron Bunsen. Einstein and Newton: A Comparison of the Two Great-est Scientists. Minneapolis: Lerner, 1973.

Manuel, Frank. A Portrait of Isaac Newton. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 1968.

———. Isaac Newton, Historian. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University

Press, 1963.

———. The Religion of Isaac Newton. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1974.

1 3 8 F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

Maury, Jean-Pierre. Newton: The Father of Modern Astronomy. New York: Harry

N. Abrams, 1992.

McGuire, J. E., and T. Martin, eds. Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton’sTrinity Notebook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

McLachlan, Herbert. The Religious Opinions of Milton, Locke, and Newton.

New York: Russell and Russell, 1972.

———, ed. Sir Isaac Newton’s Theological Manuscripts. Liverpool: Liverpool


McMullin, Ernan. Newton on Matter and Activity. Notre Dame: University of

Notre Dame Press, 1978.

Meli, Domenico Bertolini. Equivalence and Priority: Newton Versus Leibniz.Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993.

Merton, Robert K. On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript. Chi-

cago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Moore, Louis Trenchard. Isaac Newton: A Biography. New York: Scribners, 1934.

Newton, Isaac. Observations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypseof St. John. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2003.

———. Optics, or Treatise on the Reflections, Inflections and Colours of Light.Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2003.

———. Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Trans.

Cohen, I. Bernard and Anne Whitman. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1999.

———. The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended. Whitefish, Mont.:

Kessinger, 2004.

Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s Optics andthe Eighteenth Century Poets. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946.

North, John David. Isaac Newton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Palter, Robert. The Annus Mirabilis of Sir Isaac Newton, 1666–1966. Cam-

bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970.

Pemberton, Henry. A View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy. London, 1728.

Rattansi, Piyo M. Isaac Newton and Gravity. London: Wildwood, 1974.

Richardson, Robert S. The Star Lovers. New York: Macmillan, 1967.

Robinson, Henry W. and Walter Adams. The Diary of Robert Hooke MA MDFRS 1672–1680. London: Taylor and Francis, 1968.

Scootin, Harry. Isaac Newton. New York: Messner, 1955.

Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution. Chicago: Cambridge University

Press, 1984.

Shapiro, Alan E. Fits, Passions, and Paroxysms: Physics, Method, and Chemis-try and Newton’s Theory of Coloured Bodies and Fits of Easy Reflection.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.


———. The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1984.

Stukeley, William A. Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life. London: Taylor and

Francis, 1936.

Sullivan, J. W. N. Sir Isaac Newton, 1642–1727. London: Macmillan, 1938.

Taylor, Brooke. Contemplatio philosophica. London, 1793.

Thrower, Norman J. W. ed. Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: A LongerView of Newton and Halley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Turnbull, H. W., et al. eds. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1959–77.

Turnor, Edmund, ed. Collections for the History of the Town and Soke ofGrantham. London, 1806.

Villamil, Richard de. Newton: The Man. New York: Johnson Reprint Corpo-

ration, 1972.

Wallis, Peter and Ruth. Newton and Newtoniana. Folkestone, England: Dawson,

1977.

Weld, Charles R. A History of the Royal Society. London, 1848.

Westfall, Richard S. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge:


———. The Life of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1993.

Whiston, William. Historical Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Samuel Clarke. Lon-

don, 1730.

———. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. William Whiston. London,

1749.

White, Michael. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Reading, Mass.: Addison-

Wesley, 1997.

Whiteside, D. T., ed. The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1967–80.


1 4 1I N D E X

I N D E X

Acta Eruditorium, 118, 119

alchemy, 53–62

biblical scripture studies, 58, 60, 61

experiments in, 54–56

microcosm/macrocosm issues, 56–57

Newton’s last attempt at, 83–84, 86

religious beliefs of Newton, 60–62

Anne, Queen of England, 100, 106

Arbuthnot, John, 79

Aristotle, 13, 15

Arouet, François Marie (Voltaire), 124

Aubrey, John, 43

Ayscough, William, 10

Ayscough (maternal grandparents), 4

Babington, Humphrey, 27, 79

Barrow, Isaac, 36–38, 60

Barton, Catherine (niece), 98–99, 114,

122–124

Bate, John, 6–7

Bentley, Richard, 106, 115

Bernoulli, Johann, 95, 96, 97, 118

The Bible, 58, 60, 61

bubonic plague (Black Death), 24–25

calculus, 26–27, 117, 118

Cambridge University, 25. See also Trinity

College, Cambridge

Cassini, Jaques, 97

Cavendish, Henry, 57

Chaloner, William, 92–95

Charles I, King of England, 1–2

Charles II, King of England, 38, 41

Cheyne, George, 38

Clairaut, Alexis Claude, 68

Clarke, Joseph, 9

Clarke, William, 5, 7, 54

coining press, 92Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 45

Collins, John, 36

De Analysi per Aequationes by Newton

shown to, 37

Leibniz’s feud with Newton, 117

Newton’s resignation from Royal

Society, 47

comets, 18–19, 74–75

Commercium Epistolicum (Newton), 120

Conduitt, Catherine (Kitty), 123, 126

Conduitt, John, 19, 122–123, 125, 126–

127

Convention Parliament, 79, 80–81

Copernicus, Nicolaus, 14, 15, 73

Cotes, Roger, 115

Cromwell, Oliver, 1, 2, 6

De Analysi per Aequationes (Newton), 37,

42

Democritus, 18

De Motu Corporum in Gyrum (Newton),

67

De Revolutionibus (Copernicus), 14

Descartes, René, 31

Des Maizeaux, Pierre, 25

“Discourse on Observations” (Newton),

50

dynamics, 70

Einstein, Albert, 57, 127

Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 91

Ellis, John, 106

executions, 90–91

experimentation/experiments

alchemy, 54–56 (See also alchemy)

prisms, 31–33

at Trinity College in Cambridge, 18–

20

experimentum crucis, 32

steps of written up by Newton, 41

verification and duplication efforts,

45–46, 52

1 4 2 I N D E X

Fatio de Duillier, Nicolas, 82–83, 86–87,

118

Flamsteed, John, 110–114, 115–116, 125–

126

forgeries of coins, 92–95

Franklin, Benjamin, 124

Galileo Galilei, 15–17, 69

George, Prince of Denmark, 106, 112, 113

gravity/gravitation

“falling apple” story, 27

orbit of the moon, 27–30

theories by Newton, 49–50, 70–72

The Great Fire of London, 30–31

Gregory, David, 77

Gregory, Francis, 8

Gregory, James, 39

Gresham, Thomas, 104

hair, Newton’s, 54

Halifax, Lord (Charles Montague), 81, 88

Hall, Francis “Linus,” 48

Halley, Edmond, 63–64

comets, study of, 75

first visit with Newton, 66

Flamsteed’s opinion of, 110, 111

informed of Newton making Warden of

the Mint, 88

“Ode to Newton,” 77

publication of the Principia, 68–69

receiving De Motu Corporum inGyrum from Newton, 67

replacing Flamsteed as Royal

Astronomer, 125–126

Hipparchus, 73

Historia Coelestis (Flamsteed), 111, 116

Hooke, Robert, 43–45

criticism of Newton’s work, 46–47

death of, 101–102

feud with Newton, 50–52, 66, 68,

107–108

on planetary orbits, 63–64

Huygens, Christiaan, 41, 45, 81

“An Hypothesis Explaining the Properties

of Light” (Newton), 49, 52

Index Chemicus (Newton), 56

inertia, 17

James II, King of England, 79

Jervas, Charles, 106

Jupiter (planet), 71

Kepler, Johannes, 15, 16

Ketch, John “Jack,” 90

King Solomon, 58, 59

King’s School at Grantham, 5, 8

Kneller, Godfrey

portrait of Newton in 1689, 78, 79–80

portrait of Newton in 1702, 106

Lavoisier, Antoine, 57

lead poisoning, 85–86

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 95, 116–

121

l’Hôpital, Marquis de, 77

light

Opticks (Newton), 108

prism experiments, 31–33, 41–42

theories of, 44–45

Linus (Francis Hall), 48

Locke, John, 81

friendship with Newton, 82, 83

letters from Newton, 84–85, 87

on Opticks by Newton, 108

Logarithmotechnia (Mercator), 36

London, 89–91

The Great Fire, 30–31

Newton’s first visit to, 35

plague, 24–25

Louis XIV, King of France, 45, 97

Macbeth (Shakespeare), 53

Manuel, Frank, 51

Mary of Orange, Queen of England, 80

Mathematics

calculus, 26–27, 117, 118

Philosophiae Naturalis PrincipiaMathematica by Newton, 68–76

(See also Principia (Newton))

Trinity College studies, 20–21

Whiston on Newton, 25

Mead, Richard, 123

Menke, Otto, 118

Mercator, Nicholas, 36

mercury poisoning, 85–86

microcosm/macrocosm problems, 57

Microphagia (Hooke), 50

Millington, John, 85

minting of coins, 92. See also Royal Mint

Moirve, Abraham de, 79

Monmort, Rémond de, 99

Montague, Charles, Lord Halifax, 81, 88,

98

Montague, James, 106

moon, orbit around the earth, 27–30

1 4 3I N D E X

Moray, Sir Robert, 45

motion of bodies

calculus used for, 26–27

Galileo’s theory, 17

gravity/gravitation, 27–30, 70–72 (Seealso gravity/gravitation)

Newton’s principles in the Principia,70

oblate bodies, 72–73

The Mysteries of Nature and Art (Bate), 6–7

Neale, Thomas, 92, 99

Newton, Humphrey, 54–55, 64–65

Newton, Isaac. See also under individualtopics

birth of, 2

grandparents, 4

hair, 54

mother and father, 3 (See also Newton

Smith, Hannah (mother))

niece, Catherine Barton, 98–99, 114,

122–124

portrait of by Godfrey Kneller, 78 (Seealso portraits of Newton)

Newton, Isaac (father), 3

Newton, Michael, 128

Newton Smith, Hannah (mother), 3

death of, 64

Newton’s clashes with, 9–10

remarriage of, 4

as widow, 5

Nomenclature (Gregory), 8

North, John, 19

oblate bodies, 72–73

Observations upon the Prophecies ofDaniel, and the Apocalypse of St.John (Newton), 61

“Ode to Newton” (Halley), 77

Oldenburg, Henry, 41, 42

Hooke’s criticism of Newton’s work,

46, 47

Hooke’s feud with Newton, 51

On the Art of Combination (Leibniz), 116

Optica Promota (Gregory), 39

Opticks (Newton), 107–109

Palitsch, George, 75

Pardies, Ignance Gaston, 45–46

Parliament, 79, 80–81, 100

Pellet, Thomas, 56Pepys, Samuel, 25

Newton’s letter to, 84, 87

as president of Royal Society, 67

Peter I, Czar of Russia (Peter the Great),

96–97

philosopher’s stone, 55–56

Philosophiae Naturalis PrincipiaMathematica (Newton), 68. Seealso Principia (Newton)

Philosophical Transactions (Royal Society

journal), 40, 42

Bernoilli’s questions, Newton’s

answers to published in, 96

Newton’s rebuttal of Hooke’s criticism

published in, 47

physics, 70

plague, 24–25

planets, 15, 70. See also motion of bodies

portraits of Newton, 78–80, 105–106

Priestley, Joseph, 57

Principia (Newton), 68–76

comets, 74–75

De Motu Corporum in Gyrum(Newton) as seed of, 67

gravity, laws of, 70–72

motions of planets, 71–73

Opticks compared to, 107, 108

publication of, 68–69

reaction to, 77, 79

sea tides, 73–74

second edition of, 115–116

prisms, experiments with, 31–33

Pulleyn, Benjamin, 13, 21

Puritans, 1–2

Raleigh, Walter, 91

reflecting telescope, 39–41

Reive, Richard, 39

religion, 60–62

Royal Mint, 88–100

Catherine Barton as Newton’s

housekeeper, 98–99

William Chaloner as forger, 92–95

London, description of around 1695,

89–91

Newton appointed as warden to, 88–89

Newton becoming master of, 99–100

Peter the Great’s visit to Newton, 96–

97

in Tower of London, 91

Royal Society, 101–109

criticism of Newton’s work, 45–47

on death of Newton, 128

death of Robert Hooke, 101–102

decision between Newton and Leibniz,

119–120

1 4 4 I N D E X

De Motu Corporum in Gyrum(Newton) read before, 67

feud between Newton and Hooke, 50–

52

Flamsteed in, 112–113

foreign membership in, 114

Robert Hooke in, 43–45

Newton made president of, 102–103

Newton’s early years with, 43–52

Newton spending time at during

Convention Parliament, 81

Newton’s theories on gravity, 49–50

Newton’s threatened resignation from,

47–49

Thomas Pellet not printing Newton’s

works on alchemy, 56

permanent home for, 104–105

publication of Opticks by Newton,

107–109

reflecting telescope demonstrated for,

40–41

Ruland the Lexicographer, 55

Saturn (planet), 71

scientific method, 18, 103

Scripture, biblical, 58, 60, 61

sea tides, 73–74

Shakespeare, William, 53

Sharp, Abraham, 114

sizar, 12–13

Sloane, Hans, 104, 107

Smith, Barnabas, 4, 22

Smith, Benjamin, 126

Stokes, Henry

as headmaster at Grantham school, 7,

8, 9

interceding on Newton’s behalf, 10

on Newton’s graduation, 11

Storer, Catherine, 10–11, 23

Stukeley, William

on Barrows’ first opinion of Newton, 36

on childhood of Newton, 5, 6

dining with Newton, 125–126

on the “falling apple” story, 27

on Newton’ long life, 124

on Newton’ presidency of the Royal

Society, 105

on Newton’s death, 127

on pastimes of the adolescent Newton,

9

on Trinity College exams, 23

Swift, Jonathan, 98–99

Taylor, Brooke, 99

telescope, reflecting, 39–41

tides, 73–74

time, Newton’s childhood fascination

with, 6–7

Tower of London, 91

A Treatise of the System of the World(Newton), 29

Trinity College, Cambridge, 12–23

closing for the plague, 25

Galileo’s works, 15–17

Kepler’s works, 15

mathematics, 20–21

Newton elected as Fellow of, 34

Newton knighted at, 106–107

scientific experimentation at, 18–20

Trinity notebook, 13–14, 18

John Wickins, 21–22

Vincent, Thomas, 24

Voltaire, 124

Wallis, John, 88

water clock, 7

Whiston, William, 30

comment of Newton’s about Leibniz

to, 121

friendship with Newton, 83

on Newton’s mathematical skills, 25

replacing Newton as professor at

Cambridge, 100

Wickins, John

becoming Newton’s roommate at

Trinity, 21–22

elected Fellow of Trinity with Newton,

34–35

on Newton’s hair, 54

severing ties with Newton, 64

William of Orange, King of England, 80,

89, 100

Woolsthorpe Manor, 24–33

calculus, 26–27

gravity/gravitation calculations, 27–30

mother returning to, 5

Newton born at, 2–3

Newton staying at with grandparents,

4

plague, 24–25

prisms, experiments with, 31–33

Wren, Christopher, 63, 64, 104